Thirty years of research have revealed just how strange the underground animal with the strange nose really is.

The star-nosed rat is certainly one of the strangest-looking animals in the world. If you look face to face with an octopus, you might think that its head has replaced a small octopus.

And for a near-dwarf animal, the American species has incredible speed: The world’s fastest eater, it can find and eat an insect or worm in a quarter of a second.

As the shaggy little meat beast plows the soggy soil, its head moves continuously. In the gerbil’s dark underworld, sight is useless—instead, it senses a world swarming with prey. The field mouse hunts for its star on the ground as quickly as possible; it can touch 10 or 12 different places in a second.

It looks random but it’s not. With each touch, 100,000 people send information to the mouse’s brain. There are now more touch sensors in the human hand, all packed into a tip smaller than a fingertip.

And it is one of two animals in the world capable of smelling underwater, exhaling tubes of air and sucking them into its nose.

“If I use the word ‘awesome’ a lot, it’s because I really feel that way outside of them,” says. In fact, he uses the word 10 times to describe Surname.

On Thursday, Catania will present three decades’ worth of research at the annual Experimental Biology meeting in Chicago, part of a conference on the most extreme anatomy in the world.

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As the world’s leading expert on star-nosed rats, Catania herself is somewhat odd.

Most biologists study a fair number of species, and some will frown when students choose a “pet.” But Catania makes a case for studying the world’s weirdos, creatures whose enhanced abilities say something about the way we work.

“Eʋolution has solved a lot of problems in a lot of different ways,” he said. “We can learn a lot from that diversity.”

For example, research into the sense of touch in the sensitive noses of mice has found clues about how molecular touch works.

Catania has revealed that a giant star pattern that mirrors the mouse’s strange nose is printed right into the brain’s anatomy. Each time the rat pressed its star against the ground, it essentially created a star-shaped image of its surroundings, and these images came together in its brain like puzzle pieces.

Ease our pain?

“Compared to other senses, we know very little about our sense of touch,” says neuroscientist Diana Bautista, who studies pain and itch at the University of California, Berkeley.

When Bautista called Catania out to ask for cooperation, he insisted that she go pick rats with him in rural Pennsylvania. Digging the rats into their underground burrows in wetlands is difficult work, she said.

Working with Catania, Bautista created molecules in the comet’s star that convert a physical force—whether it’s a feather duster or the tip of a needle—into electrical signals that are the currency of the nervous system.

Since many of these molecules are also found in humans, such an understanding could lead to new treatments for pain.

More mysteries about moles

Catania has many mysteries he still wants to solve—can they feel detailed textures with just a touch of their rays?

All of these questions require a scientist dedicated to the strange—and one who isn’t afraid of getting wet.