The planarian flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea is an extraordinary animal. Even when cut into tiny pieces, each piece can regenerate back into a complete and perfectly proportioned miniature planarian. Key to this ability are fascinating adult stem cells, a single one of which can restore a complete worm. But how Schmidtea mediterranea achieves these feats is so far poorly understood. An important step towards this goal is the first highly contiguous genome assembly of Schmidtea mediterranea that researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden in cooperation with the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) report in the current issue of Nature. The assembly reveals a genome that contains novel giant repeat elements, new flatworm-specific genes, but also the absence of other genes that were so far thought to be absolutely essential for keeping an animal alive. The discovery has potential implications in the fields of regeneration research, stem cell biology and bioinformatics.