A man from Birmingham, who was born with three penises, is only the second person ever proven to have the strange deformity, doctors have claimed.
Just one of the three were functional, according to doctors who published the extraordinarily rare case of a condition known as triphallia in a medical journal.
The other two were attached within the skin of the scrotal sac, which houses the testicles.
The 78-year-old’s condition was only discovered after he donated his body to science upon his death.
It is believed the man may have gone his whole life without being aware of his ‘remarkable anatomical variation’.
A man from Birmingham , who was born with three penises, is only the second person ever proven to have the strange deformity, doctors have claimed
Doctors at the University of Birmingham’s medical school said one in every five to six million boys is born with more than one penis, with just over 100 cases of diphallia – two penises – recorded worldwide
Doctors at the University of Birmingham’s medical school said one in every five to six million boys is born with more than one penis, with just over 100 cases of diphallia – two penises – recorded worldwide.
But the man is only the second to have triphallia.
One case in India went viral in 2015 but experts could not verify the tale because it was never detailed in a medical journal.
The first case was confirmed in a report in 2020, when the unidentified boy from Duhok, Iraq was just three months old.
Urologists found neither of the extra penises had a urethra, the tube that urine passes through, and decided surgery was the best option.
Students in Birmingham made the new discovery while dissecting the body of the man who was roughly six feet tall and ‘of a medium to large build’.
But they also found the third penis had different anatomical features to the first ‘functional’ penis and second, located in the skin of the scrotal sac.
The additional penis had neither corpus spongiosum, a mass of spongy tissue, or a urethra.
Writing in the Journal of Medical Case Reports, doctors said the man may have lived with ‘functional deficits’ because of this.
This could have included urinary tract infections, erectile dysfunction, or fertility issues.
Dyspareunia — lasting or recurrent genital pain that occurs just before, during or after sex — may have also been an issue given ‘the potential erection of the secondary and tertiary penises’, they added.
Scientists are still baffled over the cause of supernumerary penises — the technical name for the extra members — the first case of which was reported in the 1600s.
There is no known single risk factor — but it’s thought to happen by chance when genitalia develops in the womb.
In almost all reported supernumerary penis cases, surgeons have surgically removed the additional penis.
