31 fingers and toes
The baby was born in the Chinese village of Zhongping in the country’s southern Hunan province and is about eight-months-old. Specialist doctors in China handling the case have been waiting until the little boy is old enough to start the series of corrective surgeries necessary to safely remove the extra digits.
If they remain, doctors say those extra digits could impede the child’s ability to walk. The surgeries will remove all extra fingers and toes and do shaping work on those that remain. They will sculpt a thumb for each hand out of an existing finger.
The condition whereby a person is born with extra fingers or extra toes or, as in this case, both, is called polydactyly and, as wiki notes, it is “a congenital physical anomaly in humans, dogs, and cats having supernumerary fingers or toes.”
Polydactyly record
It is rare, about one in every 1,000 births, and more often there is just one extra digit. A baby being born with 31 digits is not often encountered. How does this happen?
Not everyone born with an extra finger, toe or both has someone in their gene pool that had polydactyly, though this boy’s mother has an extra finger on each hand.
The known record for the most digits on one human is 34, the number of digits a little boy in India was born with in 2010. This boy had seven fingers on each hand and 10 toes on each foot.
The boy in India was also born without thumbs but during the surgeries to cut off the extra fingers and toes they sculpted a finger on each hand into a thumb.
