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Twin

For other uses, see Twin (disambiguation) and Twins (disambiguation).
Identical twins can be difficult to visually distinguish when young, as demonstrated by brothers Billy and Bobby Mauch.

Twins are two offspring produced by the same pregnancy.[1] Twins can be either monozygotic ('identical'), meaning that they develop from one zygote, which splits and forms two embryos, or dizygotic ('non-identical' or 'fraternal'), meaning that each twin develops from a separate egg and each egg is fertilized by its own sperm cell.[2] Since identical twins develop from one zygote, they will share the same sex, while fraternal twins may or may not. In very rare cases fraternal (and semi- or half-identical) twins can have the same mother and different fathers (heteropaternal superfecundation).

In contrast, a fetus that develops alone in the womb (the much more common case in humans) is called a singleton, and the general term for one offspring of a multiple birth is a multiple.[3] Unrelated look-alikes whose resemblance parallels that of twins are referred to as doppelgänger.[4]

  1. ^ MedicineNet > Definition of Twin Archived 2013-10-22 at the Wayback Machine Last Editorial Review: 19 June 2000
  2. ^ Michael R. Cummings, 5-7 Twin Studies and Complex Traits in "Human Heredity Principles and issues" p. 104.
  3. ^ "Twins, Triplets, Multiple Births: MedlinePlus". Nlm.nih.gov. Archived from the original on 2016-06-03. Retrieved 2016-06-16.
  4. ^ Orwant, Jon. "Heterogeneous learning in the Doppelgänger user modeling system." User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 4.2 (1994): 107-130.

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