A mother with no mate.

This is the female casque-headed iguana, and here are her eight babies.

It happened through a process called parthenogenesis.

That’s when unfertilised eggs develop into embryos.

The offspring are genetic clones of their mother.

It came as quite a surprise to staff at the zoo.

"The keepers had noticed that she'd been digging because they would lay their eggs underground. So we kept our eye on her, we started looking where she'd been digging and she'd started laying some eggs," explains Scott Adams, owner of Telford Exotic Zoo.

"We come in one morning and I don't know if you've seen the pictures, but you know, lots of eggs with tiny little noses sticking out. And they'd started to hatch. So obviously that's when we realised that we'd had a birth by parthenogenesis," he adds.

And Adams is certain the female hasn't received any secret male visitors.

"Unless it's escaped from another zoo, got to Telford, broke into the enclosure, and then let itself out and gone back to another zoo in the meantime. But I'm going to say 100% no, yeah. This is definitely a female that's never met a male before," he jokes.

The babies are being kept in the zoo’s reptile nursery at just the right temperature and humidity, replicating the humid forests where they are found in the wild in Central and South America.

"We're always promoting kind of obviously helping animals in the wild, you know, conservation but this is kind of like almost like nature's helping itself," says Adams.

According to Mark O'Shea, professor of Herpetology at the University of Wolverhampton, this is a case of "facultative parthenogenesis."

"Facultative parthenogenetic species are normally sexual species with males and females but sometimes females in isolation give birth or lay eggs without contact with a male, a sort of last-ditch attempt to reproduce," he told the Associated Press via email.

"It has been recorded in Komodo dragons, garter snakes, rattlesnakes, file snakes, our green anaconda at the Safari Park, and now Scott’s casque-headed lizard," he added.

Two of the young iguanas will go to another zoo. The rest are expected to go on public display soon.