{"id":198761,"date":"2024-11-03T17:27:24","date_gmt":"2024-11-03T23:27:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/unusual-time-travel-creature-can-age-in-reverse-astonishing-scientists"},"modified":"2024-11-03T17:27:24","modified_gmt":"2024-11-03T23:27:24","slug":"unusual-time-travel-creature-can-age-in-reverse-astonishing-scientists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/unusual-time-travel-creature-can-age-in-reverse-astonishing-scientists","title":{"rendered":"Unusual \u201cTime-Travel\u201d Creature Can Age in Reverse, Astonishing Scientists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/unusual-time-travel-creature-can-age-in-reverse-astonishing-scientists2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A recent article in <em>PNAS<\/em> unveils a remarkable discovery: the ability for reverse development in a ctenophore, commonly known as a comb jelly. These findings indicate that life cycle flexibility in animals may be more widespread than previously believed.<\/p>\n<p>Animal life cycles typically follow a familiar pattern, declined in countless variations: they are born, grow, reproduce, and die, giving way to the next generation. Only a few species are able to deviate from this general principle, the best-known example being the \u2018immortal jellyfish\u2019 <em>Turritopsis dohrnii<\/em>, which can revert from an adult medusa back to a polyp. This elusive group of animals with flexible life cycles now includes the ctenophore <em><i>Mnemiopsis leidyi<\/i><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe work challenges our understanding of early animal development and body plans, opening new avenues for the study of life cycle plasticity and rejuvenation. The fact that we have found a new species that uses this peculiar \u201ctime-travel machine\u201d raises fascinating questions about how spread this capacity is across the animal tree of life,\u201d said Joan J. Soto-Angel, a postdoctoral fellow in the Manet Team at the Department of Natural History at the University of Bergen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent article in PNAS unveils a remarkable discovery: the ability for reverse development in a ctenophore, commonly known as a comb jelly. These findings indicate that life cycle flexibility in animals may be more widespread than previously believed. Animal life cycles typically follow a familiar pattern, declined in countless variations: they are born, grow, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[269,1515],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-extension","category-time-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}