The conservation of genome regulatory elements over long periods of evolution is not limited to vertebrates, as previously ...

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 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 ...

Imagine you are drawing a starfish—where would you draw its face? Starfish have eyes at the tip of each of their arms, but the location of their heads has puzzled scientists for decades.

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 ...

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 ...

This exercise illustrates the two major features that all members of the Phylum Echinodermata have in common - the water vascular system and pentaradial symmetry. The take home message is that all ...

Along the ocean floor lives an unusual multi-armed creature. No, not the octopus, the starfish: an animal from the echinoderm family known for its spines and bumps and, most importantly for some ...

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.

COCKBAIN 1 has suggested an extension of the suture-line theory 2 of the origin and significance of pentamerism in the phylum Echinodermata, which depends primarily on the fact that all modern ...

Scientists have discovered a new species that lived more than 500 million years ago -- a form of ancient echinoderm that was ancestral to modern-day groups such as sea cucumbers, sea urchins, sea ...

A bold claim about the origins of the echinoderms is based on newly discovered fossils from China. But many pieces are still missing from this part of the fragmented puzzle of life's evolutionary ...