This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

In the 2011 action film X-Men First Class, the metal-bending supervillain Magneto triumphantly declares that mutants are the next step in human evolution.

It's a bold idea and one that crops up in a lot of science fiction.

Just imagine a future where humans sprout wings, manipulate objects with their minds, or control the elements. Definitely cool, but not exactly scientifically sound.

In reality, the idea that our next stage in evolution will be some kind of obviously superior

human is a complete misreading of how natural selection works. Evolution isn't a ladder

leading to perfection. It's more like a chaotic slow motion shuffle where environmental pressures

select for unpredictable and seemingly innocuous traits.

And yet, if we had to name a real evolutionary success story, a creature that's

withstood the test of time and emerged again and again in nature's bizarre roulette wheel,

we wouldn't be looking at a human with psychic powers.

We would be looking at a crab.

That's right, those sideways scuttling,

beach patrolling, pinch-happy crustaceans. It turns out nature loves making crabs,

and it's done it over and over through completely independent genetic trees.

The phenomenon was first noticed by British zoologist Lancelot Alexander Borodale.

He worked at the turn of the 20th century, several decades after Charles Darwin rocked the scientific world with on the origin of species.

By then, evolutionary theory was widely accepted, although scientists were still puzzling out

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