Nature: The bodies of sea stars are not their torso and limbs
[ad_1]
The head of most animals is easy to recognize, but this is not the case with starfish.
The starfish has five identical limbs with a layer of “tube feet” underneath them that help this sea creature move along the seafloor.
But new genetic research has shown this: sea stars are essentially heads without a body or tail, and likely lost these body parts over time during evolution.
Researchers say the bizarre fossils of sea star ancestors, which apparently had some sort of torso, are now making sense to them.
The results of the work were published in the journal Nature .
“It’s as if the sea star is missing a trunk entirely, and can best be described as just a head crawling along the seafloor,” said lead study author Laurent Formery, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Discoveries made possible by new genetic sequencing techniques may help answer some of the most important remaining questions about echinoderms, including their common ancestry with humans and other animals that are not at all like them.
[ad_2]
Source link
