An albino, one-eyed shark, an image of which started circulating online back in July, has been confirmed by scientists to be real. (Link:
livescience.com). Which shouldn't have been a surprise. Like the case of
Cy the one-eyed kitten (from back in 2006), the mutant shark suffered from cyclopia.
According to messybeast.com, this is a genetic abnormality in which, "the eyes are fused into a single enlarged eye that is placed below the nose (the nose may or may not form, if it forms it resembles a proboscis)."
One-eyed creatures are one of those phenomena that fit into the rule that sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. In fact, off the top of my head I can't think of any hoaxes involving fake cyclops, unless you count this old
Weekly World News story from 1989:
Comments
In Burma during the early 60s, my mother witnessed an infant, dead, with one eye in the centre of it's forehead.
I remember a story that my elementary teacher once told us, of how she had once known a three-year old boy whom she claimed to have had cyclopsia and an odd number of toes. She told us that his parents had tried to send him to a normal kindergarden and that he had died soon after she first came to know him. I later had quite a number of nightmares of that boy. =/ By now I think that a story like this should have resurfaced in the newspapers at some point in time and due to the fact that although our teacher was a nice lady she had a tendency of scaring us straight with talltales I'm not so sure anymore whether this story was real or not.
Alex, "off the top of my head" while talking about fake cyclops. It almost sounds like a Freudian Slip 😊
Or was that a reflection of your sense of humour? 😉