Men in BlackAre you sitting comfortably?
Good, because we’ve got some big news for you: apparently octopuses are so different from every other animal in the world that they are essentially aliens.
And I always thought they looked so innocent…
According to researchers, the octopus genome shows a ridiculously high level of complexity, with 33,000 protein-coding genes – much more than in a human.
Dr Clifton Ragsdale said:
The octopus appears to be utterly different from all other animals, even other molluscs, with its eight prehensile arms, its large brain and its clever problem-solving abilities.
The late British zoologist Martin Wells said the octopus is an alien. In this sense, then, our paper describes the first sequenced genome from an alien.
National Sea Life Centre, BrayCheers, science. Maybe that’s why octopuses are so good at Rubik’s Cubes?
