A red-lipped batfish: is there anything creepier? | Helen Sullivan

We've all been there. We've all felt like a badly made-up, odd-limbed, irritable floor-dwelling mess

As you contemplate the wonders of evolution, and how a creature can be born with something weird and new, and that thing can either help it get ahead or not hurt its chances, and it can then reproduce and make another one like it, spare a thought for the red-lipped batfish.

A real animal, it has the kind of mouth that, as a kid, you may have made from Babybel cheese wax, to go with your red wax fake nails. It has a beard of white whiskers. It has fins that bend backwards, like a person's arms at yoga when they are about to do upward dog. Before your eyes, it sprouts a new limb from its nostril. Its nose - technically a snout - is long, at the top of its head, and hook-shaped. It cannot swim, only crawl. Its crawl is more like a waddle.