Josh Clark

And as the thing turns more and more into what's obviously like a butterfly or a moth, and you see it hanging upside down, just forming, it looks like a cross between an H.R.

Giger painting and Michael Crichton's coma, the movie version.

It's really neat, but it also gives you this, it has this kind of regal and majestic feel to it as well.

It produced a lot of emotions in me, apparently.

Like, how did that even happen?

So this is how it happens.

The caterpillar breaks itself down into a soup of cells.

Like it's basically like a caterpillar soup for a while.

And some of the cells keep their form generally or at least stay attached to one another.

So those leg cells break.

They change.

They look different.

Like a caterpillar's actual true legs look different from the butterfly's true legs, but they're still the same cells.

They rearrange themselves a little bit.

Most of the other cells just completely come apart, turn into imaginal cells, which are analogous to our stem cells, and that they can turn into any kind of cell.

And then it reconfigures itself using the same cells, same amount, same everything.

Mm-hmm.

into a butterfly.

It reconfigures itself over the course of about two weeks.

It's unbelievable.