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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 collaborative studentship is potentially funded by the University of Reading as part of a strategic partnership to support innovative collaborative research between the University and the Natural ...