Star-nosed.

[serafaery]

Dude. I was trying to find out if the critter in my previous post was a gopher or a groundhog (I think it's a gopher - and I think the dramatic hampster was probably a gopher too, although man do gophers, groundhogs, and prairie dogs look similar sometimes!), and I came across a critter I've never heard of, the Star-nosed Mole. Holy crap that thing is weird:



and awesome!:



Its nose, the wiki article says, develops unlike anything else found in the animal world - it buds out like a flower and then the pieces break free and spread like petals blooming. Ack!