eli5: How do other animals produce more than 1 baby at a time?

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This is a pretty broad question so let me explain:

I obviously know how human babies are made, sperm goes into the egg and develops into a baby. Sometimes more than one baby can come out of the egg splits after fertilization or if two seperate eggs are fertilized at the same time. How do other animals produce more than one baby (like cats, rodents, etc)? Is it the same process?

In: Biology

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Those types of animals have a different organ for raising the offspring. Humans can only carry one in the uterus most of the time, aside from twins/triplets that often put much strain on the mother without modern medicine. Other types of mammals can carry multiple offspring in their equivalent of a fallopian tube called the horn of the uterus, where they can grow. If this happened in a human, we call it an ectopic pregnancy and it’s fatal without intervention.

Bear in mind this is all from undergrad anatomy which I took a decade and a half ago. I could have gotten names wrong, but you get the jist haha.

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