By Melissa Hogenboom   31 August 2016
Outside of humans and one species of armadillo, identical twins seem to be vanishingly rare. Now for the first time a dog has given birth to a pair.

It seemed like a normal day for Kurt de Cramer, a vet in a busy veterinary practice in South Africa’s Rant en Dal Animal Hospital in Mogale City.

He was performing a Caesarean section on a female Irish wolfhound, who showed distress and prolonged abdominal straining when she was due to give birth. For de Cramer it was a routine event; he averages about 900 Caesarean sections each year.

But something was different about this delivery. When he started the procedure, de Cramer noticed that the wolfhound had an unusual bulging by her uterus.

At first, he thought the lump was excess fluid surrounding a foetus. De Cramer painstakingly extracted this foetus from the bulge by making an incision into the dog’s uterus.

That was when the real shock came. He found not one, but two foetuses. They were both attached with umbilical cords to the same placenta.
(Cont. Reading)
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160830-first-identical-twin-dogs-discovered?ocid=ww.social.link.email