If this
starfish is making your mouth water, you're not alone. When a photo of Plinthaster
dentatus went viral on Twitter last week, pasta-lovers did a double
take — the sea star looked just like a piece of ravioli.
The photo
of the starfish,
captured on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's recent
expedition to the deep Atlantic Ocean, propelled the tasty looking echinoderm
to fame. But until now, the "ravioli" star (also called the cookie
star) was a bit of a nobody.
Even
though scientists have known of the ravioli star for some time, only recently
did the creature get a common (non-Latin) name, Christopher Mah, an
invertebrate biologist at the Smithsonian Museum at Natural History, told Live
Science. Instead, the starfish was known only by its formal scientific
name, P. dentatus.
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