By It’s a bird! It’s a crab! No, it’s a fish that can taste with its legs.
Some sea robins, a group of fishes with two winglike fins and six crablike legs, use their legs to dig in sand and find buried prey with a sense much like taste, researchers report in two papers published September 26 in Current Biology. Most sea robins seem to use their legs only for walking. But an ancient gene important for the formation of limbs in humans and other animals, as well as a gene involved in building taste buds, helped a few species develop legs that taste.
