A strangely textured region on the surface of Mars has NASA scientists excited. In its journey to a crater named Antofagasta, the Curiosity rover has discovered a strange texture patterning rocks on the planet's surface. To our eyes, the pattern looks like reptilian scaling, as if a dragon once lay in the mud. Project scientist Abigail Fraeman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory refers to it as "honeycomb-shaped polygons" in a blog post , noting that these tessellations number in the thousands.