If you love to visit the flower and bird market, you may have seen this creature with "super powers". People like to call it "hexagonal dinosaur", it has a cute face, six pink "tentacles", a white body loaded with floating and sinking, and four small short hands to pick it up.
So is it the prototype of the dragon, or the descendant of the dinosaurs? belch...... Neither.
Image source: soogif
Its scientific name is the Mexican blunt-mouthed salamander, a species of amphibians native to Mexico, also known as the Salamander, which is itself listed in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), so strictly speaking, even if its artificial species are found everywhere in the flower and bird market, it is not an absolute norm.
Hexagonal dinosaur is its popular trade name in the market, and the name can be said to completely avoid the essence of the Mexican blunt salamander. First of all, the Mexican blunt-mouthed salamander is not a dinosaur. We know that dinosaurs were a class of lizards in the Mesozoic Era, which went extinct except for the offspring birds, were reptiles, and had nothing to do with amphibians. Secondly, its hexagon is not a horn. The three pairs on its head are feathered gills, which are used to breathe in the water.
Image source: soogif
#1 Life is alive, eat and drink
It is not difficult to see from the inaccessant eyes of the hexagonal dinosaur that it will not have any special needs except for eating, drinking and breeding. For suspended foods, they can use the negative pressure in the body to push the water flow to eat.
Perhaps because they live underwater, they eat a lot of food and, like many amphibians, are unrestrained, making eating a stereotypical action of their own, a kind of salamander creed. They eat all sorts of moving insects, small fish, tadpoles, and the kind that can be beaten—yes, it sometimes sees its companion's outer gills grow out and its limbs stick out, and it will take a sip. If it is artificial breeding, the environment is closed, this phenomenon will occur more frequently.
Image source: soogif
#2 I don't want to, I don't want to grow up
Since the Mexican blunt-mouthed salamander is also an amphibian, it is said that there must be a process of metamorphosis, just like the small tadpole will grow into a small frog, but it does not do so. The underwater is so good, let's not go up! I didn't try anymore and started to mess up.
Its metamorphosis is extremely incomplete, when it was a child, it looked like a normal little tadpole, and when it grew up, it did not go ashore, nor did it like to breathe with its lungs, the most obvious feature was that its six feathered gills simply did not degenerate, and it has been used very well, and it is really the king of bathing.
Image source: soogif
This seemingly small feature, biologically called "juvenile continuation", refers to the asynchronous development of some species, and some of their characteristics in infancy and even embryonic stage will be retained until sexual maturity, retention until the reproductive period, and even death.
Of course, this juvenile continuation is also reflected in the "face", from small to large to top this cute face. Humans are born with a fondness for species with juvenile traits and will think they are cute, but the Mexican blunt salamander looks like this, it really doesn't mean to smile at you!
#3 You can do art on me, but you don't have to
In any case, most of us are interested in hexagonal dinosaurs because of its naïve appearance. But! The most classic white hexagonal dinosaur we see is actually an albino species of the Mexican blunt salamander (the lack of melanin, so it is the kind of white-skinned red eyes) or the white variant (the skin lacks any pigment, so it is the kind of white-skinned black-eyed one).
Image source: Paixin Creative
And the appearance of the wild Mexican blunt-mouthed salamander is its original appearance, unremarkable, a small black fat man with leprosy. There was no way, to protect themselves in the water body, you had to keep a low profile and put on a black mud-like skin.
Image source: Paixin Creative
Just as the so-called "technology is based on skin exchange", the Mexican blunt salamander cannot escape the fate of becoming the material of human creation. In addition to the whole body becoming white, there are now golden albinos, which are golden yellow throughout; the blackened species, the whole body is as black as ink. And that's not all, these varieties may grow up with markings, such as albinos will grow golden spots, and white varieties will grow black spots.
Human beings look at it, the color is mixed, isn't it better? Immediately, there was a rush to the striped strain, which was the same as the idea of playing koi. What's more, if the fluorescent protein gene was transferred into the body of the hexagonal dinosaur, it would also emit nocturnal light in a dark environment.
Image source: Paixin Creative
Not surprisingly, in the flower and bird market, fluorescent zebrafish and hexagonal dinosaurs are no longer rare species, and their legality has not been fully discussed in China. This technique was originally used in the laboratory to facilitate scientists to observe the results of experiments, such as the study of the super regenerative ability of the Mexican blunt salamander.
#4 Oh, a mere fatal injury
This leads to the fact that mammals do not understand the silent characteristics of birds - the Mexican blunt salamander has an overly miraculous limb resilience. We know that some reptiles represented by geckos have the characteristic of "self-amputation", that is, a behavior of actively cutting off their tails and seeking a way to survive. But their tails, which have developed again, are a strip of goods, with no formed tail vertebrae inside, supported by cartilage tissue.
Image source: Paixin Creative
The Mexican blunt-mouthed salamander has an unknown regenerative capacity than reptiles, and it can even regenerate its own limbs. For example, if a hexagonal dinosaur is bitten off a limb by its friends, its wounds will not heal themselves in the form of scars, but will grow a fully functional new claw within a few months. In some cases, they have shown that they can even repair the injured spinal cord and part of the brain, and it is easy to receive a brain tissue transplant from the outside world.
In the lab, we can observe the entire process of fracture regeneration by tracking fluorescent proteins. It turns out that after its limbs are amputated, the cells at the wound will form a series of unipotent stem cells, as if the mature tissue has "regressed", returning to a state that has not yet differentiated, and has a strong "plasticity". These stem cells gather into "bud-based" tissue, and then slowly differentiate into different types of cells such as skin, muscle, and nerves, and eventually grow a limb that is the same as the original.
Image source: soogif
The use of stem cells is so skilled that this ability is even coveted by us humans. Therefore, there is a special discipline of "regenerative medicine" in medicine, with stem cell technology as the core to study limb regeneration technology, and the Mexican blunt-mouthed salamander is really a very good model organism.
#5 What you can't go back to is your hometown
The Mexican blunt salamander is so useful, but its own living space is precarious. In the wild, the Mexican blunt-mouthed salamander lives only in parts of Mexico, and its population is gradually becoming scarce. It has become a fact that it is an endangered species.
The artificially bred hexagonal dinosaurs you can buy at the flower and bird market can no longer be released in the wild, which means that it is extremely difficult to return to replenish the wild population. The reason for this is probably because the genes of artificial breeds have shown a kind of "involution", which looks colorful, but is actually highly inbreeded - just like koi, it has no wild value. The only thing to be optimistic about is that lovers of hexagonal dinosaurs around the world are immersed in the study of these artificial species, and the black and ugly wild Mexican blunt-mouthed salamander can reduce overfishing.
Image source: soogif
If you have not seen the cute and cute hexagonal dinosaur with "super powers" in person, take advantage of the Fact that the "Insects Are Now Jianghu" exhibition of the Chongqing Science and Technology Museum is not over, come and say hello to it up close! In addition, there are jungle secrets, colorful feather forests, desert ecology, shoal streams, waiting for you to start a "thrilling, dangerous, live" rainforest exploration tour.
Exhibition time: January 1, 2022 - June 5, 2022
Exhibition Address: Chongqing Science and Technology Museum, Area A, the first floor of the exhibition hall
For more information about the exhibition, please click on the link to view ☞ the exhibition to have a "thrilling, dangerous and lively" rainforest exploration tour
About the author
Code, biology graduate student, science fiction amphibian author.
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Editor: Ren Yalin
Reviewer: Li Ting
The article is owned by the Chongqing Science and Technology Museum, and the source should be indicated when reprinted
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