Sisters Michelle and Lavinia Osbourne are twins with different fathers — something so rare that it’s never been documented before in British history and only 20 times in the entire world.
“I’m still in amazement that this can actually happen – it’s super weird, super odd, super rare – but, if I apply it to myself, it makes sense,” Michelle, 49, told The Guardian.
The women — born to a 19-year-old who drifted in and out of their lives — had a difficult childhood in which they clung to one another.
Michelle and Olivia had a ball celebrating their 30th birthday in Marrakech, Morocco in 2006. Courtesy of Lavinia Osbourne “There’s twin magic. It does exist — it’s a thing,” Michelle said. “I can feel when she’s upset, and she can feel when I’m upset.”
“There was a time when she spilled hot water on her leg, and I felt it,” Lavinia remembered.
Michelle convinced Lavinia to take the genealogy company Ancestry’s DNA test with her four years ago because she had always secretly suspected there was a fundamental difference between them.
She’s an introverted “Homebod,” while Lavinia is more “exuberant,” she said.
Although they both live in England now, when they were in their 20s, Michelle moved to Iceland while Lavinia went to Spain.
“I moved to a hot country, she moved to a cold one,” said Michelle.
The ultra-rare phenomenon is called heteropaternal superfecundation, “an extremely rare phenomenon that occurs when a second ova released during the same menstrual cycle is additionally fertilized by the sperm cells of a different man in separate sexual intercourse,” according to the journal Biomedica.
But the shocking results have no effect on their bond.
“We’re miracles. We are special,” added Lavinia. “We are always going to have a closeness that can’t be broken.”
