Ulya Margusheva - 125 years old? Mum at 79?

Russia Today are reporting a story that takes some believing, and with it a three-way tussle is shaping up for the oldest person in the world gong.

Ulya Margusheva, from the Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, has two documents, her passport and her child’s birth certificate, which state she was born in 1884 and her child was born 79 years later.

Passports schmasports, clearly they could be fakes, but why go to the trouble? If there was a large cash prize for being super-old then perhaps. Of course, we are only interested in the world's oldest person round these part, but Ulya's dash for the title of the world's oldest mother has us gobsmacked.

"I explain it by the fact that she lives in an ecologically-safe environment," says Maria Tembotova, the republic's chief obstetrician. "She's a healthy woman herself and despite the fact she got married in her late she had a healthy lifestyle. So it is possible in theory."

Possible in theory? Which we take as meaning she's a woman and woman can have babies.