Remember the alien in the classic movie?
Instead of a tounge, it had a separate set of jaws and teeth.
Now look at this picture from real life:
OK - strictly speaking it is a pair of animals living together in some kind of skewed symbiosis*, with the isopod having eaten the animal's tongue, and then burrowing in and living in the tongue's place.
There is a discussion of it on Pharyngula, which is where the picture comes from:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/09/isnt_nature_beautiful.php
To quote a BBC article in 2005:
Mac
(*Note Perhaps it is strictly a parasite. But I'd like to think the host get's something out of the deal, though.)
Instead of a tounge, it had a separate set of jaws and teeth.
Now look at this picture from real life:
OK - strictly speaking it is a pair of animals living together in some kind of skewed symbiosis*, with the isopod having eaten the animal's tongue, and then burrowing in and living in the tongue's place.
There is a discussion of it on Pharyngula, which is where the picture comes from:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/09/isnt_nature_beautiful.php
To quote a BBC article in 2005:
Mac
(*Note Perhaps it is strictly a parasite. But I'd like to think the host get's something out of the deal, though.)
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Some of the other links in there were very interesting too, like the big coconut crabs.
