Jad Abumrad

I think he looks shocked too.

Wait, I don't understand.

Where did the caterpillar go?

It seems like once the caterpillar gets into its shell, it sort of just melts.

Its head, legs.

They all just dissolve.

Muscles themselves just sort of like dissolve away into individual muscle cells.

And some of the cells rupture, and so their insides, the amino acids, the proteins, those all go floating out into space.

Wait, you're saying that the caterpillar just becomes like a soup of cells?

Yeah.

And yet somehow... This soup will magically be transformed into a butterfly or moth.

Well, how does that happen?

That question, that question is the big, fat, metaphysical, quasi-religious, semi-mystical, philosophical question that people have been asking forever.

This is Matthew Cobb.

He's a biologist and a historian.

And he says back in the 1600s, when naturalists saw that goo, they just thought, oh, well, clearly what's happening is that the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis.

And then it actually dies.

Totally dies.

This beautiful and completely new creature.

Death, as it were, and then a kind of resurrection.