Lady Gaga Fern

It's trendy to name new species after celebrities, but when biologist Kathleen Pryer of Duke University and her team discovered a new genus of fern, they named it after Lady Gaga not just because they're big fans of her music, it's also because of eery similarities between the two:

... in her performance at the 2010 Grammy Awards, Lady Gaga wore a heart-shaped Armani Prive' costume with giant shoulders that looked, to Pryer's trained eyes, exactly like the bisexual reproductive stage of the ferns, called a gametophyte. It was even the right shade of light green. The way the fern extends its new leaves in a clenched little ball also reminds Pryer of Gaga's claw-like "paws up" salute to her fans.

The clincher came when graduate student Fay-Wei Li scanned the DNA of the ferns being considered for the new genus. He found GAGA spelled out in the DNA base pairs as a signature that distinguishes this group of ferns from all others.

Link | YouTube clip


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