A Diamondlike Structure Gives Some Starfish Skeletons Their Strength

upstart writes:

A diamondlike structure gives some starfish skeletons their strength:

[...] Beneath a starfish's skin lies a skeleton made of pebbly growths, called ossicles, which mostly consist of the mineral calcite. Calcite is usually fragile, and even more so when it is porous. But the hole-riddled ossicles of the knobby starfish (Protoreaster nodosus) are strengthened through an unexpected internal arrangement, researchers report in the Feb. 11 Science.

[...] Li and colleagues used an electron microscope to zoom in on ossicles from several dozen dead knobby starfish. At a scale of 50 micrometers, about half the width of a human hair, the seemingly featureless body of each ossicle gives way to a meshlike pattern that mirrors how carbon atoms are arranged in a diamond.

But the diamondlike lattice alone doesn't fully explain how the ossicles stay strong.

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