The girl who was born with COLA: the Brazilian baby has a 6 cm long appendage in an extremely rare phenomenon

A baby in Brazil was born with a tail, surgeons have revealed in a fascinating new report.

Doctors removed the girl’s 6cm-long appendix, which was covered in skin and protruded from her back.

Incredible before-and-after photos published in a medical journal show her three years after her life-changing operation.

Fewer than 200 cases of the phenomenon, an abnormality during pregnancy, have ever been reported in the literature.

The tale of the unidentified girl was published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery Case Reports.

The girl was born with spina bifida, a rare spinal defect that occurs in utero and causes a gap in the spine.

This is, according to the doctors who treated the girl, probably to blame for her having a tail.

The surgery also closed the hole and removed the appendix.

Doctors at GRENDAAC, a children’s hospital in Sao Paolo, said the tail sprouted from the lumbosacral region, the area that connects the spine to the pelvis.

Doctors diagnosed the appendage as a ‘pseudo-human tail’.

Pseudotails are growths that resemble a tail but are caused by spinal problems or tumors.

They are different from true tails, which contain muscles, blood vessels, and nerves, but no bones.

Researchers from the Ohio Fetal and Placental Research Center studied the case along with Brazilian doctors.

They wrote: ‘Human caudal appendages are rare lesions that impose enormous stigma on their carriers and parents.

Fetal caudal appendages are associated with spinal dysraphisms (spina bifida) and therefore their presence requires careful evaluation for underlying spinal cord defects.

‘Identification of the many possible associated abnormalities is essential to plan the correct treatment and provide good quality advice.’

They added that surgery is important to avoid stigma and complications such as pain, torsion, increased growth, irritation, or rupture.

Human tails are believed to emerge from the embryonic tail that all babies develop in the womb.

Physical examination found a 6-cm skin-covered tail of soft tissue growing from the lumbosacral region, according to a report published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery Case Reports.

For almost all babies, it is reabsorbed back into the body to form the tailbone.

But it is believed that it turns into a tail in extremely rare cases.

They usually go undetected until after a baby is born and doctors don’t know what causes them, with only one example of them running in families.

Human ancestors, along with our ape relatives, lost their tails when we diverged from monkeys around 20 million years ago.

In some religions and cultures, human tails are considered sacred and are worshipped.