Common starfish's gruesome hunting trick: Forcing stomach through mouth to digest prey

Along the tidal margins of Britain and Ireland, a creature without a brain or blood has been perfecting the same method of predation for 450 million years — longer than dinosaurs, longer than most of what we call the natural world. The common starfish, unremarkable to the passing eye, dissolves its prey from the inside out by extruding one of its own stomachs through its mouth, a strategy so effective that evolution has seen no reason to revise it. In an age that prizes speed and complexity, this slow, patient, inside-out hunter offers a quieter lesson: that endurance, not innovation, may be n