Guest Author - Kris Bigalk

Alicia and Jasmin Singerl were born in 2006 in Australia, to a mother of Jamaican-English heritage and a German father. Alicia is fair and blonde like her father, while Jasmin is dark-skinned and dark-haired, like her mother.

Another set of fraternal girl twins, Kian and Remee Hodgson, were born in Britain in 2005. Both parents were of mixed race. Kian has dark skin, eyes and hair, and Remee is blonde, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned.

Experts say that such sets of twins are very rare, since most mixed-race individuals carry both dark and light-skinned genes in most eggs and sperm. Some eggs and sperm will be predominantly or totally dark or light, but for both sperm and egg to match up to create such differences in twins is against the odds.

Of course, such twins are always fraternal twins, since identical twins always share the same color of hair, eyes, and skin.

The other possibility when twins of different races are born is that each twin has a different father—but this is even more rare than the million-to-one odds of mixed-race individuals having twins that are so different.

One such case occurred in the Netherlands in 1993, when a couple undergoing in-vitro fertilization gave birth to twins of different races. Upon investigation, it was found that the lab equipment used to fertilize the woman's eggs had not been adequately cleaned, and that another man's sperm had fertilized one of her eggs. Because this man was of African descent, one of the twins inherited his dark skin, hair, and eyes.

There are also documented cases of black and white twins with different fathers going back as far as the early 1800's in the United States, when a white woman gave birth to a black twin and a white twin, forcing her to confess to having an affair with both a white man and a black man at the same time.

Experts disagree on the frequency of half-sibling twins, but most agree that twins of different races being born is quite an unusual event.

To view a photo of the Singerl twins, Click here.

To view a photo of the Hodgson family,Click here.