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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.