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Mystery #1Tier 2minibeasts / metamorphosis

How does a crawling caterpillar become a flying butterfly?

A caterpillar is basically a hungry, wriggling tube with no wings and far too many legs. A few weeks later, out climbs a butterfly with wings, a long curly tongue and six neat legs. This is not a costume change: almost nothing about the two bodies matches. So what on earth happens inside that little case?

A monarch chrysalis hanging by a thread, gone dark and see-through just before emerging, with the orange and black wings visible folded inside
Photo: Tina Shaw / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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