A Routine Dissection Found Two Extra Penises

When University of Birmingham medical students cut into the pelvis of a donated cadaver, they were expecting a routine anatomy session. The 78-year-old man on the table had, by all external appearances, perfectly normal genitalia. He had two more penises hidden inside his scrotal sac.

The condition is called triphallia, and it has been documented in a living human exactly once before: a 3-month-old boy in Iraq in 2020, who had his two extra penises surgically removed. Scientific literature now contains exactly two documented cases of triphallia, and this is the first one ever found in a cadaver rather than a living patient. The case report, published in the Journal of Medical Case Reports by researchers at Birmingham's medical school, describes what they found when they went looking: inside the skin of the scrotal sac, adjacent to the primary external penis, were two smaller penile structures. All three included a glans and corpus cavernosum, the spongy erectile tissue.

The anatomy is stranger still on the inside. The primary penis and the largest supernumerary penis shared a single urethra, which coursed through the secondary penis before passing through the primary penis. The smallest, innermost structure had no urethra at all. Researchers believe all three arose from a triplication of the genital tubercle, the embryonic tissue from which the penis develops, with the urethra rerouting itself during fetal development when one structure failed to fully form.

The man is unlikely to have known. His external genitalia appeared normal. His medical history was unavailable to the dissecting team per donor protocol, though researchers note a prior inguinal hernia repair on record and speculate he may have experienced recurring urinary tract infections or other urological complications he never connected to an underlying cause. Without dissection, the anomaly would have remained undiscovered entirely.

This man's donated body allowed a rare variation of sexual anatomy to be studied closely instead of being corrected or quieted.

Read the full story at Live Science, June 10, 2026

Hot Take: You can now add "supernumerary penis" and a couple extra inches to your vocabulary. You're welcome.