![]() Advertisementsįrank and Louie could not feed himself at first, so Marty tube fed him with a special formula for three months until he learnt how to eat on his own. Marty took pity on the one-day-old kitten and decided to rescue him, although experts warned her that he was unlikely to survive very long. She was working at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University when Frank and Louie’s breeder brought him in to be put down. ![]() “The technical term for such a cat is a diprosopus, but as this is not the most readily pronounceable term, however, when I first wrote about such cats over a decade ago, I coined for them the term 'Janus cat', named after the Roman god of doorways, Janus, who had one body and one head but two faces, just like these cats." Advertisementsįrank and Louie was owned by Martha “Marty” Stevens, a veterinary nurse from Massachusetts. “Cats such as Frank and Louie, born with two faces, suffer from a developmental abnormality known as diprosopia, in which the face widens and partially duplicates during embryogeny due to the excessive production of a specific protein called SHH,” Dr Shuker explained. The term ‘Janus cat’ was conceived by Dr Karl Shuker, a British zoologist who moonlights as a life sciences consultant for Guinness World Records. This made him the longest-surviving Janus cat ever. ![]() He was born on 8 September 1999 and died on 4 December 2014, aged 15 years 87 days. ‘Janus cats’ such as this rarely survive more than a day following their birth, however, Frank and Louie lived a remarkably long life. He had three eyes, but the ‘shared’ central eye was blind and did not blink. He had one brain, but possessed two near-separate faces, each with its own nose and mouth.īoth mouths were connected to a single oesophagus, although only one of the mouths was functional the other had no bottom jaw. Frank and Louie, despite having two names, was just one cat.
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