I read Your Inner Fish and got inspired for a new creature:)
So we humans are bilaterally symmetrical, with a functional difference between front and back, and another between back and belly. But there’s no functional difference between left and right. In the same way, jellyfish have a difference between up and down, but no front versus back.
What if we had an animal with three axes of asymmetry? Right vrs. left is as different as back-vrs.-front and top-vrs-bottom. But while it’s easy to see why a worm crawling along the ocean floor would evolve a head and a belly, why would it evolve a specialized structure on its right as opposed to its left side? What force could there be that always acts on an animal orthogonally to gravity and its direction of motion?
Published on January 20, 2019 06:52