yup! with one caveat- that’s what the skeleton of an INFLATED pufferfush looks like!

let’s backtrack real quick- if you’ve ever seen one at an aquarium, you might have noticed that pufferfish seem kind of… stiff.

unlike a regular fish, they don’t bend at ALL in the middle and have to get around by just wiggling their oversized fins super hard, like a man who’s been duct-taped to an office chair scooting around with his feet!

NO GETTING UP ALLOWED, BRIAN.

BUT ANYWAY their stiff movement and weird spiky skeleton are definitely connected, no bones about it!

no apologies for this.

if you take a good hard look at the skeleton in the first pic, you’ll notice that the spiky bones aren’t actually connected- they just sit under the pufferfish’s skin like caltrops and expand to spread themselves apart and point outward when the pufferfish inflates!

so when the pufferfish ISN’T inflated, these bones actually layer over each other to form a very stiff armor consisting of multiple layers of bone spikes, which. is not very flexible. but it does prevent some random eel from just wandering up and stuffing them in its mouth, you have to admit!

so tldr: pufferfish skeletons are really cool, but they had to take a HUGE movement penalty to get it!