Scientists couldn’t find the head of the starfish. Turns out, the entire thing is head, it’s the body that is missing.

    • mrbaby@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The way she everts her stomach and digests you with her enzymes. You just can’t get that with other gals.

  • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 months ago

    this feels kinda silly, like surely we’re the ones defining what the head is here? head and body doesn’t make sense for a starfish, it’s like asking where the head of a potato is

    • brianorca@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      No, it’s not English semantics they are using here. It’s DNA semantics. They looked for DNA markers and gene expression to define what is head or tail of various animals, and found that most of the starfish expressed those similarly to the head of other animals.

    • brianorca@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      One of the previous theories had the head in the middle and tail at the edge of the arms. But this study showed that the DNA markers for “head” are expressed all through the starfish, and there are no “tail” markers at all.

      • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        So what I’m getting here is that they basically proved that Starfish evolved from a clade that predates the development of basically everything we consider an animal save for spongeoforms