daily Nature News with me. Roast swan, octopus, squid and cuttlefish are so strange that there was recently a bit of a social media meme claiming they were actually from another planet. Well, they're not, as a new study of their DNA confirms, but they are really pretty amazing animals known as the soft bodied or coal Lloyd cephalopods, they have the largest nervous systems of any invertebrate. And get this. The squid has a genome 50% bigger than a human and the octopus only a little bit smaller. These are not simple creatures but highly evolved in intelligent animals with a range of unique abilities. A major new project coordinated by the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts as she's completed the genetic sequencing of three cephalopod species. It's a tour de force of scientific investigation, which occupied several labs around the world for several years. They sequenced the Atlantic long fin inshore squid, the Hawaiian bobtail squid and the California two spot octopus. What they found is that their genomes are as strange as the animals. There's evidence of massive reorganisation of their genetic material early in their history. This led to them developing large and elaborate brains completely independently of vertebrates. What this means is that big brains have evolved twice on Planet Earth, and that's really quite a discovery. One agent is tomorrow.

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