In greek mythology, Argus had 100 eyes, while the Cyclops had but one. Reality, though, is sometimes stranger than myth. If Joanna Aizenberg, of Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories, in New Jersey, and her colleagues are correct, there is a real creature that combines these legends perfectly—and to add to its monstrous qualities, has five arms and no head. It is Ophiocoma wendrii, a brittlestar. According to their paper in this week's Nature, this animal has a single eye, but that eye is made not of 100, but of thousands of components, and is scattered over the whole of the animal's upper surface.
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