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 ...

The film explores the fascinating world of echinoderms, focusing on sea stars and their relatives, such as sea urchins and sand dollars. It describes their unique body structures, including radial ...

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 ...

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 ...

Sea cucumbers are the ocean's janitors, cleaning the seabed and recycling nutrients back into the water. But this humble marine invertebrate could also hold the key to stopping the spread of cancer.

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.

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 ...