Jonathan explores the strange world of echinoderms, a group of roughly 7,000 marine species that includes sea stars, brittle stars, feather stars, sea urchins, sand dollars and sea cucumbers. Despite ...

The recent Invertebrate Wars reminded me of spectacular, but often ignored, group of gastropods. The parasites! This is a group that I have totally geeked out on in the past. In my previous work I ...

Echinoderms such as starfish are unusual for their five-fold body symmetry. Maps of gene-expression patterns show how this body plan was acquired, and that the genes specifying head structures do the ...

Sea stars and their relatives eat, breathe and scuttle around the seafloor with tiny tube feet. Now researchers have gotten their first-ever look at similar tentacle-like structures in an extinct ...

The conservation of genome regulatory elements over long periods of evolution is not limited to vertebrates, as previously thought, but also in echinoderms (invertebrates). This is one of the most ...

Echinoderms are one of the most highly derived groups of animals with many species as significant components of several marine communities. They’re classified by three fundamental shared ...

The impact on levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere by the decaying remains of a group of marine creatures that includes starfish and sea urchin has been significantly underestimated.

The impact on levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere by the decaying remains of a group of marine creatures that includes starfish and sea urchin has been significantly underestimated. The ...

"Presented as a Paleontological Society Short Course at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, Salt Lake City, Utah, October 19, 1997"--P. iv. Introduction to the Paleontological ...

Fossil echinoderms, including the common Cambrian and Ordovician echinoderms figured here (Fig. 1 from Deline, et al., 2021; request permission to use here) have a rich and diverse fossil record.

The evolution of the sea star, sea urchin, and other echinoderms’ body shape during the Cambrian and Ordovician periods was faster and more dramatic than their ecological innovation, according to a ...