Starfish

 We've been going along with our dissections, and last week we did starfish.

The nice thing about starfish is that even fairly young kids can do the actual dissection with scissors (although probably not kid "paper" scissors).

Choclo built this tower and I gave it 5 stars!

Each arm has the same stuff - in fact each arm has all the major body systems, which is why each one can regenerate a new animal as long as it has a tiny bit of the central disc.

I find starfish interesting because they are an exception to the way I think about animals.  I tend to think of invertebrates as animals without skeletons, but here's an animal with no back bone, but a full endoskeleton!

Also, I think they are beautiful.

We had fun looking at our dissection specimen, and then looked for the structures on our dried starfish. 

Spiny skin! Tube feet! Eye spots!  Sieve plate (squirt spot)! All our different looking starfish have all the features.