| 1 | Humans have a fovea for sight, and star-nosed moles have a fovea for touch. | |
| 2 | AS OFTEN OCCURS, our observations about the star-nosed mole's sensory system raised as many questions as they answered. | |
| 3 | The naked mole rat is also of interest because it is extraordinarily long-lived for a rodent of its size (up to 28 years) and holds the record for the longest living rodent. | |
| 4 | The backward developmental sequence suggests that ancestral star -nosed moles might have had strips of sensory organs lying flat against the sides of the snout. | |
| 5 | The discovery of a somatosensory fovea in the star-nosed mole suggests that this organizational scheme is a general evolutionary solution to constructing a high-resolution sensory system. |