In fact, it's happened so often that there's a scientific term for it: carcinization. If you close your eyes and think of a crab, you might picture a round, flat body. Big front claws and multiple ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. It's true: Crabs keep turning up in nature, and it's bothering ...

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Coconut crabs are massive. Up to three feet in diameter, they scuttle across remote tropical islands in the western Indo-Pacific Ocean, cracking open coconuts like they’re made of butter, eating ...

A flat, rounded shell. A tail that's folded under the body. This is what a crab looks like, and apparently what peak performance might look like — at least according to evolution. A crab-like body ...

Crabs are living the meme life on social media lately. The memes joke that everything will eventually look like a crab. But it's actually based in some truth. The crab shape has evolved so many times ...

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Thomas Mulligan investigates the biological phenomenon of carcinization to understand the evolutionary drive that repeatedly shapes unrelated organisms into crab-like creatures.

You’ve seen the memes—“everything will eventually evolve into a crab” or “crab is the ideal form”—while scrolling online. These are parodies of a real scientific concept, carcinization. In biology, ...

Carcinization is the repeated evolution of a crab-like body plan in different crustacean lineages. New genomic work is adding molecular and time-calibrated context to a story long told through anatomy ...