have you hugged a roly-poly today?

Today I learned that it has been hypothesized that life began to leave the seas to escape an impressive, ever-increasingly-efficient predator - the shark. I now know why my sister is so completely terrified of sharks, it has to do with her ancestors' exodus to land.

And I learned that the first animals to make the journey to the land were not, as is often supposed, fish with lungs (like mud puppies) or amphibians, but pill bugs (or roly-poly-type critters). It would seem that we owe our existence as terrestrial beings to the roly-polies. This is also confirmed by the fact that Sheryl and I liked to play with them when we were little. I'm not sure that they enjoyed being played with, but we didn't ask. I am now certain that they deserve more respect than to be roly-polied and flicked about.

So I've also learned that sharks eat roly-polies - I had no idea. Pretty big day for me. Give me a few more thousand years and I'll get the entire evolutionary process figured out.

(Short History of Nearly Everything, p. 338)