I have long thought that the chief architect of the animal kingdom was a very tidy person and that all vertebrates were organised on more or less the same lines. Two hands, two feet, one head, one heart, one tail and so on. A tidy picture which is not significantly disturbed by oddities such as snakes and whales.
Then over breakfast this morning, I read in the Economist that some vertebrates, not very many to be fair, and some of them are extinct, have three eyes and some have four. And while these extra eyes are wired into the brain in a slightly non-standard way, at least some of them are full blown eyes with retinas and optic nerves, in the same way as the two that we have. So the kingdom is not quite as tidy as I had thought. All very tiresome.
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