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 ...

As mist lingers over a Swedish fjord lined with towering, forested cliffs, a group of scientists collect mud from the bottom of the turquoise-colored waters. They’re after brittle stars—marine animals ...

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 ...

Researchers collected dozens of sea creatures known as brittle stars from Mexico’s Pacific coast between 2011 and 2020, but when they looked through archives to try to identify their catch ...

(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.