It has a pleated gill like a lion's bristle, small eyes without eyelids, a mona Lisa-like smiling mouth, short limbs, a torso that cannot tell whether it is a body or a tail, and looks like a large tadpole that is about to complete its transformation.
It has four pigmentation genes, and in the wild it is mostly tan with spots. But after the genetic mutation, different color variants are created, such as white and pink.
This cute creature with pink beeps has a very domineering name: hexagonal dinosaurs! It is endemic to Mexican amphibians and is also a suborder of salamanders, generally growing in length around 20-30 cm. Hexagonal dinosaur scientific name: Mesiot blunt-mouthed salamander, also known as Mexican blunt-mouthed salamander. (In the following article, the author will introduce them as "hexagonal dinosaurs", because I think this title is domineering enough... ）
Hexagonal dinosaurs were once the top predators in local lakes and rivers, preying on any prey they could catch, including molluscs, fish, insects, etc., and they even preyed on their own kind.
However, data show that in the 1970s and 1980s, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations introduced tilapia and carp into their habitats, which provided more protein for the locals and also gave up the top predator throne, because both tilapia and carp would feed on young hexagonal dinosaurs, posing a serious invasion threat to them.
Hexagonal dinosaurs are not only impressive for their unique appearance, but also for the continuation of their juvenile state. Unlike most amphibians, hexagonal dinosaurs did not metamorphose into land animals that completely breathed with their lungs, they lived in water all their lives and always remained the same as they were when they were born, so some people call them wonderful creatures with an "ageless" appearance.
This is not the most amazing thing about the hexagonal dinosaurs, the most powerful thing is their magical resilience! Some people may think that this is nothing:
Losing its tail is nothing for some animals, because geckos-like ones have been able to regenerate;
Losing its claws is nothing, because crab-like animals are also able to regenerate;
Then I would say: Losing the tail, losing the limbs, losing the ovaries and lung tissue, or even losing part of the brain and spinal cord, it's nothing! Because the hexagonal dinosaur did it and could regenerate! Do you believe it?
Don't believe it, because this pair of hexagonal dinosaurs is just "pediatric"! Some researchers have proved through experiments that various organs, including the eye, can be transplanted between salamanders, and there will be no allogeneic rejection. Researchers even transplanted the head of one hexagonal dinosaur to another, and the results showed that not only was there no rejection, but the head functioned normally.
It is also these super-long abilities of hexagonal dinosaurs that make it a biological model that scientists focus on.
"As long as the damage is not fatal, it can regenerate anything"! Some researchers believe that if they can find the genetic basis of the regenerative ability of hexagonal dinosaurs, they may be able to find ways to repair damaged human tissue. But their attempts were thwarted by another feature of the hexagonal dinosaurs: It had the largest genome of all the animals that had been sequenced to date, 10 times larger than the human genome.
Although, there is now an ingenious way to bypass the animal's complex genome to identify at least two genes associated with regeneration. But in the face of about 32 billion pairs of DNA nucleotides in hexagonal dinosaurs, it still looks dwarfed.
Regrettably, since the 13th century, when the Aztecs settled in the Valley of Mexico, discovered the hexagonal dinosaurs in the lake around Tenochtitlan Island, and gave them the title of "God of Fire and Lightning", the hexagonal dinosaurs did not seem to have escaped the fate of being eaten.
Usually the Aztecs would kill hexagonal dinosaurs for food, which is still eaten in Mexico today. But from its very beginning, boiled into broth has escalated to the point where it is considered "good medicine" throughout Mexico to treat pregnancy, weakness and respiratory diseases. Even after artificial cultivation, they are made into raw materials for cough syrup...
At the same time, in an effort to expand the city to prevent flooding, five lakes in the Mexican valley where hexagonal dinosaurs now exist have been largely drained, and the original habitat of hexagonal dinosaurs has disappeared. The only remaining wild hexagonal dinosaurs can only live in the swampy areas around Mexico City.
But ironically, the hexagonal dinosaur has been a pet for more than 100 years, and it is loved by many pet owners around the world. Therefore, compared to the fact that the origin of Mexico is on the verge of extinction, hexagonal dinosaurs are not scarce in the pet market.
And in scientific laboratories around the world, there are hexagonal dinosaurs with a base number of thousands. But to the researchers' regret, almost all of these hexagonal dinosaurs came from the first 33 samples from Mexico, so they were highly inbreeding. This also makes it more difficult to continue research.