Thursday, February 25, 2010  Answer: Only mollusk to walk on two
legs?  The answer, much to my great surprise, is the octopus!
Here's how I found it.  I knew that the search terms "two legs"
and "walking"  would be pretty common.  I can easily believe
there are millions of pages with "two legs" somewhere on them,
and that doing a search for [ mollusk walking two legs ] would
just be hopeless.  But I figured that the people most likely to
write about this kind of amazing phenomenon in the natural world
are probably science writers.  Thing about it:  a mollusk that
walks on two legs--it's not going to make the front page of the
paper, but it would probably make the science page or an article
in a nature magazine of some kind.  So my first (and only) query
was [ bipedal walking mollusk  Sure enough, the first result is
to a science media news report from UC Berkeley.  I was also
encouraged when I noticed that there were several other hits on
the page that mentioned octopus in the same snippet with
walking.  The