If you’ve ever stared at one of the ocean’s more bizarre creatures, like, say, a sea urchin, and wondered where it keeps its brain, and what its brain even looks like? Well, according to new research, you’re looking at it.

Sea urchins are basically all brain, from spikey spines down to their gelatinous cores. Even weirder: genetically, they’re not too dissimilar from us.

A team led by developmental biologist Periklis Paganos took a deep dive into the purple sea urchin’s metamorphosis, as it transforms from a free-swimming larva spiky thing to an underwater foot trap. As larvae, urchins are bilaterally symmetrical, like us. During puberty, they reorganize into a more radial symmetry, like a starfish.

When the researchers mapped which genes activate during this transformation, they discov

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