Sea Urchins are weird-looking creatures. They basically look like pincushions that sit in the ocean and don’t move around that much. They are part of the phylum of animals called echinoderms, which includes starfish, sea cucumbers, and other sea life.

It has long been assumed that echinoderms have a very rudimentary radial nervous system that allows the animal to respond to stimuli, but not much more than that.

A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, however, is changing that entirely.

The researchers used single-cell as well as gene-expression analysis to get a detailed map of every cell in the body of a purple sea urchin.

What they found was that the sea urchin had a surprisingly diverse makeup of neuronal cell types. Rather than having a decentralized nerve net, they had a brain-like system that extended throughout the entire body.

Interestingly, the researchers also found that the sea urchin has light-sensitive cells spread out across the surface of its body. These cells are not unlike those found in the retina of humans and other animals. Since they are not concentrated in one area like an eye, they cannot see as other animals do, but they can certainly detect light.

In a statement on the study, Dr. Jack Ullrich-Luter, who works at the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin, said:

“Our results show that animals without a conventional central nervous system can still develop a brain-like organization. This fundamentally changes how we think about the evolution of complex nervous systems.”

This is just one more example of how humans assume that the only type of intelligence in the world is intelligence that looks and acts like our own. It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that octopuses were seen as simple creatures that did little more than float through the ocean and catch prey.

Today, however, it is known that even though their brain is nothing like our own, they undoubtedly have significant intelligence that they use not just to survive, but also to explore the world around them.

Maybe we aren’t as smart as we think we are.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?