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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A 500-million-year-old fossil from Morocco, discovered by Natural History Museum scientists, is offering extraordinary new insights into one of evolution's most puzzling transformations: how ...

Rachael has a degree in Zoology from the University of Southampton, and specializes in animal behavior, evolution, palaeontology, and the environment. Rachael has a degree in Zoology from the ...

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 ...

define the term adaptation. describe adaptations of sea stars. explain how adaptations of animals enable them to survive in different environments. Sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars and sea ...

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.

Deuterostomes are a remarkably diverse super-phylum, including not only the chordates (to which we belong) but groups as disparate as the echinoderms and the hemichordates. The phylogeny of ...

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 ...

When I first searched the heaps of seaweeds from Beach Point to Corn Hill, my father Leonard Hansen had rented a ramshackle house that Jack built for two weeks in 1954, a great summer place to launch ...