Very Exotic Shape/Size/Colour of Tropical Animal, Present Yours?

I don't know if nudibranchs can be properly named "sea snails", since they lack a shell, even an internal one. "Sea slugs" are often used as common name for most species. There are dozens of families and hundreds of species and most of them have strange forms and atonishing colours. Unfortunately, almost none of them can be kept captive, since they're very specialized predators that only consume one or few species of, usually, cnidarians (mainly hydrozoans). Colours and shapes also are impossible to maintain in preserved specimens (in alcohol, etc).
 
Cephalopods in general are really one of the most alien-like creatures that one could imagine ever, both in morphology as in biology. The trilobite beetle, Duliticola, is also very famous, the most famous of the lycid beetles probably, and one of the few beetles whose larvae are more famous than the adults. About feather "starfish", not a starfish at all, just one of the many species and genus of sea lilies, all of them with identical looking and thus very difficult to ID. Fossil sea lilies had a much more varied morphology but extant species are all like the one on the video. I saw my first alive sea lily in Birch Aquarium last summer, unfortunately it was unidentified.
 
Kakapo said:
About feather "starfish", not a starfish at all, just one of the many species and genus of sea lilies, all of them with identical looking and thus very difficult to ID. Fossil sea lilies had a much more varied morphology but extant species are all like the one on the video.
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I was under the impression "sea lily" describes crinoids with a stalk attaching them to the substrate, whereas "feather stars" are free-swimming crinoids (as in the video). Anyway, some deep-sea crinoids are actually sessile – i.e. "living fossils" morphologically similar to the extinct taxa you mention.
 
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Oh, sorry, then is just my ignorance :( :oops: I believed that "sea lilies" was a term for all crinoids, sessile or not.
 
Kakapo said:
Oh, sorry, then is just my ignorance :( :oops: I believed that "sea lilies" was a term for all crinoids, sessile or not.
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No worries. I have to admit the existence of living fossil crinoids in the deep sea is not a fact I ever thought I'd find a use for.
 
Well known as the others. I was fortunate enough to see it last summer in my San Diego holidays. But of course it was not displaying.
 
Well known as the others. I was fortunate enough to see it last summer in my San Diego holidays. But of course it was not displaying.
 
If we are honest it would be elephants among placentals, humans and gibbons among primates et cetera. Hummingbirds are the least typical of birds, the matamata of turtles, chameleons of squamates, the sirens of salamanders.
 
Other than kakapo's list (which I didn't even bother to attempt to read - no offense :D), I'm surprised no one's mentioned the platypus yet!

But honestly, do you ever stop and just think how amazing and unique every animal is in its own way? Hey, maybe it's just because I love animals more than the Average Joe and am easily impressed. :p But when an animal in a documentary is shown on screen for an extended period of time, or if I stare at a picture of an animal in a book - or even when I just visualize a certain animal in my mind - long enough, regardless of what it is, I am blown away almost every time.

Sure, there might not be anything so visually-striking about, say, a white-tailed deer, seeing as there are several other extant species that look relatively similar to it. But when I think about antlers, for example, despite how commonplace they are among the deer family, I can't help but go, "Wow, that's pretty cool" after considering what purpose they serve, how they came to be, etc, and just the simple fact that they're extensions to the skull that are shed and regrown every year! I mean, isn't that crazy?

So, yes, obviously birds-of-paradise are more exotic than wrens, parrotfish more so than sardines, pacaranas more so than field mice, and so on. But what is hard for me is to name an animal that isn't exotic. ;)
 
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