Nothing About Crab Evolution Is Normal.. Here's Why

Nothing About Crab Evolution Is Normal.. Here's Why

Evolution is supposed to be messy, gradual, and mostly irreversible. And then crabs show up and treat the entire rulebook like a suggestion.

In this video, we break down why nothing about crab evolution is normal, and why the “everything becomes a crab” meme is way closer to reality than it has any right to be. Over the last ~200 million years, evolution has independently built crab-shaped animals multiple times through a phenomenon called carcinization, where totally different crustaceans compress into the same flat armored body with tucked tails and big claws… without being closely related.

But here’s where it gets genuinely broken:

Some “crabs” aren’t even true crabs (looking at you, king crabs).

Evolution doesn’t just make crabs, it can unmake them too (decinization/“decarcinization”), reversing crab traits in ways that should not be possible.

And crabs didn’t stop at the ocean floor, they invaded land at least a dozen separate times, including a crab found preserved in amber dating back to the dinosaur era, meaning these things were literally experimenting with life on land while dinosaurs were still around.

We’ll cover what actually counts as a crab, why the crab body plan keeps “winning,” how the fossil record shows crabs repeatedly reinventing themselves, and why this whole process is basically evolutionary chaos with claws.

If you like videos where nature behaves like it’s speedrunning bad decisions, subscribe. If you just like crabs, also subscribe. Same outcome.

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