There are anteaters! Well done!

everything in nature has analagous structures. if you don't see them you're either looking too close or too far and you need to shift your perspective. a coral reef is a forest and the corals are the trees.

Coral trees are make of rock wood and each leaf is it's own organism.

Trees are coral. Dead wood/dead limestone, wrapped over with living tissue.

We should always look to nature, yes. A lot of aerodynamic designs seem to look a lot like the world's fastest birds. Trees really do seem to optimize for capturing solar energy in an easily encoded blueprint.

But also there are a few areas where we should recognize the limits of scope of the solutions nature has provided, or recognize the path dependency in how evolution might optimize for a particular pathway that no longer should continue to pose a restriction (the giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve, for example).

We're allowed to mix and match. Just gotta be careful and recognize just how powerful billions of years of evolution is, as an optimization method.

Sharks also existed prior to Saturn's rings

It is worth noting – as someone who's reasonably knowledgeable about arguably the main example, king crabs – that carcinisation is really interesting, but I think some people took the meme semi-unironically as this especially widespread example of convergent evolution.

In reality, it's confined to some members of the true crabs' sister infraorder, Anomura. Which is still super cool, but even the faintest notion that crabs are some singularly ideal ~~male body~~ body form is just a runaway shitpost.

Why couldn't they just have called it "crabinization?"

Fish

In Speaker for the Dead?

angry, well I'm not sure whether my morality gland, my hedonism gland, or my good writing gland is more offended but whichever it is it's making angry noises

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legless_lizard