“In the species Salpingoeca rosetta, which lives in coastal estuaries, the cell prepares to divide but stops short of splitting apart, leaving two daughter cells connected by a thin filament. The process repeats, creating rosettes or spheres containing as many as 50 cells in the lab. If this all sounds familiar, there’s a reason for it — animal embryos develop from zygotes in much the same way, and spherical choanoflagellate colonies look uncannily like early-stage animal embryos.”