On Sunday morning I came across a ewe on her side while doing the rounds on our family property ‘Lilburn’ on the Red Range Road. With two back legs showing, I thought it was a breach delivery, but then another back leg and a front leg appeared.

I put my arm in to move the lamb around so I could pull it out more easily, but couldn’t find a head - it just didn’t make any sense.

The merino ewe died while straining to give birth - and I immediately did a post mortem, pulling from the uterus the knotted anatomy of what I first thought were two lambs. Unravelling it, I found a single head tucked under one of two, joined bodies, both male; it had only just died.

On Tuesday, Northern New England Rural Lands Protection Board vet Andrew Biddle had a look at the lamb, which had stored in a bag in a chest freezer.

“It’s bizarre, but very interesting. I’ve seen them in bottles, but never in the paddock,” he said.

Dr Biddle said it was most likely the lambs were conceived from two eggs, but joined early in their development. Having been sired by outcross British Breed rams, there was no chance they were a result of in-breeding.

“Unless you did an x-ray or a dissection it would be impossible to know how they joined, but the two bodies don’t seem to separate until below the shoulders.

“As far as the ewe was concerned, she kept the nutrition up to them as if they were twins - it wasn’t until she tried to give birth to them/it, that things went wrong for her.”

Dr Biddle said researchers at the DPI’s Elizabeth Macarthur Institute at Camden “were very, very interested” in the animal, for study by four trainee pathologists.

“(Scientists) certainly don’t see a lot of these,” he said.

DPI sheep and wool officer at the Glen Innes Agricultural Research and Advisory Station Chris Shands, agreed.

“Certainly it is pretty unusual in natural matings; occasionally you do see things like this in artificial or assisted breeding programs.

“When it does happen producers would be unlikely to know, because in most cases the lamb would be aborted well before full term.”