What you’re seeing is not a hoax. It is the weirdest whitetail malady I’ve seen in my 27 years of working here at D&DH.

I first reported on this bizarre fawn in the late 1990s. Even back then, some of the weirdest things I had seen were a doe that had five fawns; a deer that was born without ears; and a Texas buck that managed to live several years with a baseball-sized rock wedged firmly in its lower jaw. Yes, those were truly bizarre discoveries, but the one you’re looking at right now surely tops them all.

I received this photo from Officer Brad Stoner of the LaCrosse Police Department (WI). Stoner’s co-worker, Lt. Bob Lawrence, took the photos of this bizarre eight-legged fawn while investigating a car-deer collision during the second week of May of that year.

According to Officer Stoner, the doe expelled two fawns after being hit by a car that was being driven on a wooded road within the city’s limits. One of the fawns was “normal,” while the other fawn, shown here, appears to be a genetic freak. To the untrained eye, it appears that two fetuses fused together in the womb, creating the eight-legged fawn with a shared digestive tract. That’s not totally true, but it’s awfully close.

Such incidents are sometimes seen with domestic animals, especially dairy cows. They are rarely seen in the wild, however, probably because the animals are never found. In this case, the doe most likely would have died while giving birth, or would have given birth to a stillborn.

Longtime D&DH readers might recall a similar article I wrote that described a Maryland buck fawn that was shot by Leon Jude during a special antlerless-only hunt. That deer had two well-developed legs, complete with tiny hoofs, growing out of its shoulder blades. 

While writing that article, I interviewed Dr. Glenn Olsen of Maryland’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. According to Olsen, multi-legged animal abnormalities are usually the result of a bizarre genetic coding, rather than the fusing of two embryos.

Other biologists told me they have seen similar cases where stillborn fawns had “extra parts,” but nothing this extreme.

“You never know what will happen when cells start dividing,” one biologist said. “The really amazing thing is for the deer to have survived that long in the womb and to have developed as well as it did.”

Amazing indeed!