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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Echinoderms are a phylum of exclusively marine deuterostome invertebrates characterized by pentaradial symmetry in adults, a calcareous endoskeleton composed of ossicles, and a unique water vascular ...

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 ...