Baby born with 12cm 'TAIL' from bottom with bizarre flesh ball attached leaving doctors baffled

November 6, 2021

DOCTORS were left baffled after a baby was born with a bizarre 12cm tail from its bottom with a flesh ball attached on the end.

The baby, born at Albert Sabin Children's Hospital in Fortaleza, Brazil, is one of just 40 recorded to ever be born with a true human tail.

Medics have surgically removed both the "chain and ball", which was only spotted after he was born.

The birth and the subsequent surgery have since been logged in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery Case Reports, which explains how the "rare congenital anomaly" came to be.

It's believed that we all had a tail when we were in the womb but it is usually reabsorbed into the body a few weeks after gestation.

Doctors say this is one of the incredibly rare instances that the tail had continued to grow.

The journal report says that the first record of such a tail dates back to the 19th century but the science behind it "is not fully understood".

Analysis of the baby's tail after the surgery revealed that the 4cm-wide ball was made of fat and embryonic connective tissue, whereas the tail itself was just boneless tissue.

The child was born prematurely at 35 weeks in January this year, but no complication was found except the tail – which wasn't picked up by tests before the birth.

But luckily an ultrasound scan confirmed that it wasn't attached to the child's nervous system.

This allowed surgeons to remove it, but it is not yet clear whether it was causing the baby pain or if the parents requested the tail to be chopped.

Human's ape ancestors are thought to have lost their tails around 25 million years ago, possibly due to a genetic mutation that improved our upright mobility.