Crowdscience

Why do we have two eyes? Two ears? Two arms and two legs? Why is one side of the human body – externally at least – pretty much a mirror image of the other side? CrowdScience listener Kevin from Trinidad and Tobago is intrigued. He wants to know why human beings – and indeed most animals - have a line of symmetry in their bodies. Yet, beyond their flowers and fruits, plants don’t seem to have any obvious symmetry. It seems that they can branch in any direction. Anand Jagatia sets out to find out why the animal kingdom settled on bilateral symmetry as the ideal body plan. And it takes him into the deep oceans of 570 million years ago. Paleobiologist Dr. Frankie Dunn is his guide to a time when animal life was experimenting with all sorts of different body plans and symmetries.Frankie shows Anand a fossil of the animals which changed everything. When creatures with bilateral symmetry emerged they began to re-engineer their environment, outcompeting everything else and dooming them to extinction. Well... nearl