DURHAM, N.C. -- We humans are fixated on big brains as a proxy for smarts. But headless animals called brittle stars have no brains at all and still manage to learn through experience, new research ...

They’re after brittle stars—marine animals with long, slender, serpent-like arms—to peek into the genes that give them distinct characteristics, including the power of regeneration. “This is a huge ...

The paper J. Delroisse et al., “A puzzling homology: A brittle star using a putative cnidarian-type luciferase for bioluminescence,” Open Biology, 7:160300, 2017. Degrees of separation Although the ...

(CN) — Paleontologists in Luxembourg recently identified a new species of brittle star — a sea-dwelling echinoderm similar in appearance to the starfish — that thrived during the Cretaceous period.