To See Things Like Nobody Else - a spookfish

clipped from blog.wired.com Spookfish Sees Things Like Nobody Else Ever Has Of all the animals in the world, the lowly spookfish has the oddest eyes — compound mechanisms that bear more than a passing resemblance to rearview mirrors The bottom half of its eyes point upwards. The upper half point downwards, and are backed with a layer of reflective guanine crystals that bounce a focused image into the retina In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes — how to make an image — using a mirror," said Julian Partridge, a University of Bristol vision ecologist, in a press release Like the eyes, the specimen itself was unique: until Tubingen University neurobiologist Hans-Joachim Wagner captured one off the island of Tonga, a living spookfish had never been seen.