Incredible facts
One has straight red hair, fair skin and blue eyes, the other has curls, dark skin, and brown eyes. It's hard to believe, but these girls are sisters, and what's more, they're twins.
The girls Lucy and Maria Aylmer were born with completely different looks due to a combination of mixed-race genes.
Their mother is half Jamaican and their father is white. When the sisters were born in 1997, their mother was amazed at how different the children were.
“It was a shock, because things like skin color are not shown on ultrasound before birth,” said the girls' mother.
Twin sisters
The sisters said that their friends even required their birth certificates to prove their relationship.
“Nobody believes we're twins because I'm white and Maria is dark,” Lucy said. “Even when we dress the same way, no one believes we're sisters, let alone twins.”
The girls themselves claim that, despite the external differences, the connection between them is very strong.
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The girls have older siblings: George, 23, Chinna, 22, and Jordan, 21. Twin siblings also have mixed skin, while sisters are complete opposites.
A 47-year-old mother who works in a warehouse and a 53-year-old working father separated after giving birth to twins.
Identical and multi-egg twins
Non-identical twins come from different eggs and inherit different genes. They are also called heterozygous.
They are different from monozygotic twins, which emerge from a single zygote (an ovum fertilized by a sperm) that divides into two or more parts. Such twins are quite difficult to distinguish due to their great external similarity.
Twin girls with mother, older sister and siblings
Like siblings, heterozygous twins share about 50 percent of their DNA: each gets half of their DNA from their mother and half from their father, plus many overlapping characteristics.
The girls' mother, half Jamaican, carries genes from both white and dark skin. One of the sisters inherited genes from white skin, and the other inherited dark skin genes.
Both types of twins can be twins, triplets, quadruples, and so on.