Oddly enough, no. And that leaves us with the flea behind our ear, since identical twins (or identical twins) are perfect clones, they have the same DNA. After all, they are formed when a single egg, fertilized by a sperm, divides into two embryos. In principle, these brothers were supposed to be identical through and through. Even so, papilloscopy – the science that studies the lines of the hands and feet – says that the fingerprints of univitelinos may even follow the same formula, but they will never be the same. “The fingerprint changes from finger to finger, from hand to hand. Just as no two zebras have the same design, no two people have the same fingerprint”, says José Luiz Lopes, papilloscopist and president of the Associação Brasiliense de Peritos Papiloscopistas (Asbrapp).
How to explain the mystery then? The key lies in the contact of the fetuses’ fingers with the intrauterine environment. As they are in slightly different positions in the mother’s belly, they come into contact with different environments. This is also why, in the hypothesis of the existence of clones in the future, these would also have different fingerprints from the cloned person. The diversity of fingerprints lies in the papillae, those tiny grooves and reliefs that form drawings in the outermost layer of the skin, the epidermis. There are, on average, 36 papillae per square millimeter. They divide into countless branches, forks, detours, interruptions, and holes. Such complexity makes many experts consider the fingerprint identification method even more accurate than the DNA test. This test, after all, would not work to separate one identical twin from the other.