(Image by Samuel Chow. The yellow things are acoelomorphs.)Remember seeing a small flatworm when you were little? I don't either. They're not all that common, but they're consistently used in scientific experiments. They have impressive but erratic regeneration capabilities. One can get a flatworm with two heads, two tails, four eyes or all of the above. Flatworms are also the simplest animals to have been proven to have some sort of memory- moreover, this memory is conserved through asexual reproduction (that is, cutting the worm in two and watching both pieces regrow).
Now, it has finally been proven that the Acoelomorpha, which have always considered to be a type of flatworm, are actually their own separate phylum. They are distinct in that they, unlike other flatworms, have no gut whatsoever; they use vacuoles to digest their food, like amoebas. The Acoelomorpha were the first to branch off from the rest of the bilaterals; they are thus less closely related to other flatworms than flatworms are related to us. This has been suspected for a while, but has remained only a hypothesis until now.
-Brown Rhino
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