For me, I’ve been thinking about the fact that flamingos are considered extremophiles, it’s such a random trait for them to have I love it
How are they extremophiles?
Second fun fact, but not well remembered. They’re pink color comes entirely fron what they eat. I forget WHAT it is they eat though.
shrimp!
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Flamingos can thrive in environments with hypersaline and caustic water (ex lake Natron), they can survive really high ph levels, they can survive in crazy temperatures and altitudes, and they enjoy(?) drinking boiling water, to name a few reasons! They’re crazy animals!
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The order Artiodactyla in mammals includes both even-toed ungulates (like deer, cattle, pigs, antelope, etc.) and cetaceans (whales, dolphins). It has to be the most morphologically diverse order of any animal. Hippos and whales are actually included in the same suborder (in contrast, snakes and lizards are in separate suborders). I know the genomic evidence supports these relationships and taxonomy is a man-made construct but still hard to wrap my head around it.
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Littorinimorpha might be a contender here. Terrestrial, freshwater, and intertidal to deep sea snails. Differences in size of factors up to 30,000,000. Very diverse body plans.
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Yeah, I should have said “of any vertebrate animal”.
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Squamata has forms from tube with only front limbs (mole lizard), to toothy lizard whale(mosasaur). I’m sure an argument can be made for almost any order to be most morphologically diverse, if you know enough of them.
Ilex crenata and Osmanthus look nearly identical but are actually in different orders.
Paulownia tomentosa(princess tree) closest relatives are Orobanchaceae, Phrymaceae, and Mazaceae, which are not trees at all but small shrubs.
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I like the fact that some butterfly caterpillars eat nothing but ant larvae.
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Often on my mind: that I (and each of us) have an unbroken genetic connection to every other living (and previously living) thing on our planet. The only variable is how deep in the past each connection diverged.
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i cant get over that those deep sea tubes have a stomach but no tube in or out of it 
their digestive system is kind of like a circulatory system
edit to add scishow video
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Rats will actually free another rat that’s trapped, even when there’s nothing in it for them. Once they figure out how to open the little cage, they pretty much keep doing it. And when scientists put chocolate in the room, the free rat still freed the other one first… then shared the chocolate.
Link to publication if anyone’s interested.
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The colors of dinosaurs are virtually unknown; except for Sinosauropteryx, which had the exact same colors as a raccoon: Black mask, stripy tail
White-throated sparrows have two color morphs, tan-striped and white-striped. But White-stripes will only mate with tan-stripes and tan-stripes will only mate with white-stripes.
or how about just the plain existence of a fly like this? https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/706362-Achias
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Sloths can hold their breath longer than dolphins! That surprised (and amused) me a lot. I guess it’s because of their slow metabolism or something.
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On the topic of sloths, I read this in New Scientist decades ago. You can see when a sloth is active or not, and you can measure their brain activity to show when they are mentally active or sleeping. But the patterns don’t coincide. Some of the time that a sloth is active, its brain is asleep.
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Axolotls are a fairly big deal here and some years ago an article about their regenerative ability mentioned that sea stars can also regenerate arms (which I had known) but can also regenerate their entire bodies if necessary from a solitary arm under certain conditions (which I had not known).
I think about that and regeneration in general, including human’s ability to regenerate liver, any time I see an anole with a shortened tail, indicating it has been dropped, so fairly frequently. I find regeneration remarkable.
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Evolutionary developmental biology (often called evo-devo) is a fascinating field in biology and explains how major changes in morphology occur at the developmental level with relatively small changes in what genes are turned on or off and when. It changed how I thought of evolution and still think about it. If you ever wondered how it’s possible that so much diversity among life forms could have been generated over time, which I certainly wondered about back in my college days, evo-devo provides an extraordinary understanding of the mechanisms.
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Another cool thing is what scientists have done with hydras in regeneration studies. They took a hydra and gently separated it into individual cells using standard lab methods—basically enzymes and careful mechanical stirring until the animal was fully dissociated. Once they had this suspension of single cells, they let the cells settle and stick back together. What’s wild is that the cells didn’t just clump randomly. Over the next couple of days, they began sorting themselves into the right layers and positions, and eventually the aggregate reorganized into a functioning hydra again. It’s one of the few animals where you can dissociate it into single cells and still get a complete, normal organism forming afterward.
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For me it’s predatory fungi. I remember reading some fungi have poison harpoons to shoot at micro-organisms, and then the grow and consume the catch through the harpoon. Other one I read were these loops, that suddenly and violently expanded when something was going through them, crushing the prey and then consuming it.
Hmm… Now that I think about it. I might have to go verify this as I have not done so. 
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