Twins with different gestational lengths / same birthdate?

From a royal geneology site:

http://www.dcs.hull.ac.uk/cgi-bin/gedlkup/n=royal?royal05899

Any thoughts on how this is possible?

One of the babies must have died in the womb at three months gestation. The other twin continued to grow to seven months when it died, and was stillborn.


I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.

Maybe one died in utero months previous, while the other continued to grow, only to die at 7mos. gestation.

Just a WAG.

That’s what I said.

Ha, Ha :slight_smile: Beat you to it!


I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.

But wouldn’t the mother end up with one hell of an infection (which would probably have been fatal in those days, and she did survive 'til 1714)?

Hey, didn’t something like this happen recently, within the last year or so? The twins lived, IIRC, but they were born a couple of months apart. An early test revealed that one of the twins had some sort of defect(I believe it was a heart defect), that could actually be corrected, if they did a C-section, took out the twin with the defect, and did the surgery.

Here’s a short quote from Parents.com

"The death of one twin is not a rare occurrence. Frequencies range
from 2.2 to 6.8% of twin gestations. When one twin dies, it may
become what they call a “fetus papyraceous”. The fluid is reabsorbed
and the fetus is compressed by the growth of the living baby. This
happens in single pregnancy losses as well and is the basis for the
tabloid newspaper headlines of “80 year old woman gives birth to
baby” (or mummified baby). "

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwie.

Qwisp: I’ll add that to my LoTtICHHLMLNK (List of Things that I Could Have Happily Lived My Life Not Knowing.)


“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island