7 Crazy Stories About Twins That Will Have You Asking “What the F*ck?” Get ready to slide down a Google rabbit hole. Shutterstock

If it seems like twins are everywhere these days, it’s because they actually are. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the twin birth rate rose 76 percent from 1980 through 2009, and one in every 30 babies born in 2009 (the most recent year data was collected) was a twin. 

Why are there so many twins lately? There are a lot of factors at play, says Lawrence Prince, M.D., Ph.D., division chief of neonatology at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego and associate professor of pediatrics at University of California, San Diego. He cites in vitro fertilization (IVF) and genetics among the reasons. Research has also found that obese women, those who are taller, and women who wait until later in life to get pregnant actually have increased odds of having multiples, says reproductive geneticist and ob-gyn Susan Klugman, M.D., a representative of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics.

With any birth and new baby, unusual things can happen—but it seems like it happens more often with twins.

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“There are a variety of interesting situations that can arise with twins,” says Prince. “All twin and multiple gestations are more likely to have certain birth defects and complications. Some are unique to non-identical twins, and some only occur in the instances of identical twins.”

He’s not exaggerating—there have been some very bizarre twin stories that have cropped up lately. We got Prince, Klugman, and twins expert Nancy Segal, Ph.D., director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, to rank these headline-grabbing twin stories from most likely to happen to super rare, plus how they might have happened:

The Twins That Were Born with Two Different Skin Colors
People often do a double-take when they hear that Lucy and Maria Aylmer are fraternal twins. Why? They have different skin colors. “No one ever believes we are twins because I am white and Maria is black,” said Lucy, who has red hair and fair skin, in an interview with Barcroft Media. “Even when we dress alike, we still don’t even look like sisters, let alone twins.”

This is rare but is becoming more common now that biracial marriages are more prevalent, says Segal. “It’s not surprising, especially if the parents have very distinct genetic backgrounds,” says Prince, who explains that this can only happen with fraternal twins, and obviously, that it can only happens with parents who have different skin colors. It's basically the same as any other kid a biracial couple would have, he says, since fraternal twins have two different eggs and sperm. It's just like parents with different eye and hair colors having children with different traits.

The Twins Who Were Conjoined and Shared Their Chest, Abdomen, and Intestinal Tract
Twin boys Carter and Connor Mirabel were successfully separated via surgery in early May when they were five months old, the New York Daily News reports.

Conjoined twins happen when the fertilized egg divides later than usual during development in utero, and it doesn’t happen often. “It’s not common, which is fortunate,” says Prince, adding that roughtly one in every 200,000 identical twin births are conjoined.

The Twins Who Had Two Different Fathers
A woman in New Jersey found out that her twins were fathered by two different men during a paternity case. During the testimony, she admitted to sleeping with a man who was different from her partner a week after she thought she conceived the twins, the New York Times reports.

Segal says this is “supposedly rare, but my guess is it occurs more often that we think” since we only know about the cases that are discovered. (Hey, there are plenty of women who cheat on their partners and don’t ‘fess up.)

This can happen when a mom releases two different eggs at the same time, says Prince, and he cites estimates that say about two percent of twins have different fathers.

RELATED: This Couple Didn't Tell Anyone They Were Having Twins Until the Babies Were Born

The Twin Sisters Who Both Got Pregnant with Sets of Twins
Fraternal twin sisters Ashlee Spinks and Andrea Springer both gave birth to twin boys on the same day in Georgia. What?

“It’s a blessing,” said Springer in an interview with the Associated Press. “It’s hard enough for a lot of people to get pregnant, especially pregnant with twins.”

She’s right…sort of. The odds of twins giving birth to twins on the same day is almost unheard of, but it’s not unusual for twins to give birth to other twins, says Prince. “The chance of a mom having non-identical twins seems to run in families,” he says. (The genetic history of the dad, interestingly, doesn’t come into play, though.)

 

 

Mommy is feeling good after the c-section! All 4 babies have dark hair!! ♥️♥️♥️♥️

Posted by A Miracle Unfolding-Gardner Quadruplets on Sunday, December 28, 2014

 

The Woman Who Had IVF and Delivered Two Sets of Twins
A woman in Utah gave birth to two sets of identical twins last year. Yup, that’s four babies at once, and half of them look like the other. Ashley Gardner became pregnant with the help of IVF and was on bed rest for a month leading up to the births, says CNN.

While Prince admits he’s never heard of this happening before, he says that “all bets are off with IVF.”

RELATED: This Woman Didn’t Know She Was Pregnant—BOTH TIMES

Corpus Christie Medical Center

The Woman Who Gave Birth to Identical Triplets, Two of Them Conjoined
Sylvia Hernandez gave birth to identical triplet girls this month in Texas, which the Washington Post reports, happens in one in 50 million births. Even more rare: Two of the triplets are conjoined.

Prince points out that conjoined babies only occur with identical multiples. He says it implies that there was an earlier split of the egg and then a later split that didn’t fully separate. But, as he says, this is a rarity on top of another rarity.

The Woman Who Had Two Wombs—and Got Pregnant with a Set of Twins in One and Another Baby in the Other
British woman Hannah Kersey gave birth to twins and another baby at the same time—and carried them in two different wombs. The 23-year-old is believed to be the first woman in the world with uterus didelphys (i.e., having two wombs) to give birth to triplets, BBC News reports. 

Prince calls this “extremely rare,” especially since it can be difficult for women with uterus didelphys to carry twins to full term in the first place.

Twins run in your family? Don’t freak out: Klugman stresses that all of these situations are extremely unlikely.