Tardigrades, the microscopic animals also known as water bears and moss piglets, have captured the imagination of scientists for almost 250 years, thanks to their Muppet-like appearance and their ability to survive extreme environments that would destroy most other living things. One of these skills is the ability to endure being dried out for up to a decade or longer. In Molecular Cell on March 16, a team of scientists report that this knack for survival is due to a unique set of proteins they dubbed tardigrade-specific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs).