The Paris zoo's latest attraction is a brainless, eyeless, single-celled organism with no limbs or stomach but more than 700 genders.
Meet the "blob", also known by its scientific name Physarum polycephalum or "many-headed slime".
Preceding humans on Earth by some 500 million years, the creature resembles a kind of slippery sponge.
It appears stationary, but does cover ground—at a leisurely pace of up to one centimetre (0.4 inches) per hour—in search of prey, such as mushroom spores, bacteria, and other microbes.
From Saturday, members of the public can become better acquainted with "le blob", which has taken up residence in a large tank at the zoo in Paris' Bois de Vincennes park.
Named after the 1958 sci-fi horror movie "The Blob" about an alien creature that crashes to Earth and devours residents of Pennsylvania, the real-life blob consists of a single cell, sometimes with many nuclei that can replicate their DNA and divide.
Mostly yellow, but also in varieties of red, white or pink, the blob is found most often on decaying leaves and tree trunks in cool, moist spots such as woods.
"The blob is really one of the most extraordinary things that live on Earth today," the president of Paris zoo, Bruno David, said as he introduced the creature to journalists in the French capital.
"It has been here for millions of years, and we still do not really know what it is. We don't really know if it's an animal, if it's a fungus or if it's something between the two,"
