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London, UK
Doctors in the UK were shocked to find that a man whose body was donated to science for research work had three penises. However, the man likely went his entire life without knowing that he had such a rare anatomy since his external genitalia looked completely normal.
Three penises is an extremely rare condition and is known as triphallia. The first case in humans was recorded only four years back in a three-month-old boy from Iraq.
The discovery has been published in the Journal of Medical Case Reports. It is only the second case of triphallia to have been documented in humans and the first in an adult man.
The deceased man was 78 years old, white, about six feet tall and had a completely normal-looking penis. When the researchers dissected his dead body, they were astonished to find two other distinct penises internally.
They went on inspecting the organs further and found that the urethra ran through both his primary and secondary penis. The second penis was smaller but had all three main tissues of a penis - the corpus cavernosum, the corpus spongiosum, and the glans (the head).
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The third penis was located behind the second one but was not connected to the urethra and did not have the corpus spongiosum.
His primary penis measured around three inches long, while the other two were around 1.5 inches.
“This case report, based on an extensive literature review, describes the serendipitous discovery during cadaveric dissection of the second reported human case of triphallia, distinctly morphologically different from the previous case,” the researchers mentioned in the report.
Reason for multiple penises
Medical records state that people with extra organs survive and live life normally. Extra penises are believed to be caused by genetic mutations.
The penis develops from a tissue known as the genital tubercle, and in this case, the mutations likely caused a triplication of his genital tubercle.
They state that the analysis showed his urethra first developed from the secondary penis. But when the second penis did not develop fully, the urethra shifted towards his primary penis.
The man’s identity or his medical history was not known to the researchers because of local cadaver donation laws.