Deuterostomes are the major division of animal life which includes sea stars, acorn worms,
and humans, among a wide variety of ecologically and morphologically disparate taxa …

Abstract The Cambrian Explosion by nature is a three-phased explosion of animal body
plans alongside episodic biomineralization, pulsed change of generic diversity, body size …

Echinoderms are a major group (phylum) of invertebrate animals with a rich fossil record
stretching back to the Cambrian period, approximately 518 million years ago. While all …

The early history of deuterostomes, the group composed of the chordates, echinoderms and
hemichordates, is still controversial, not least because of a paucity of stem representatives of …

Once considered 'weird wonders' of the Cambrian, the emblematic Burgess Shale animals
Anomalocaris and Opabinia are now recognized as lower stem-group euarthropods and …

Macroevolutionary inference has historically been treated as a two-step process, involving
the inference of a tree, and then inference of a macroevolutionary model using that tree …

The diversification of the earliest echinoderms is “explosive” in both space and time.
Lepidocystids are the most basal blastozoans and their earliest known occurrences …

Various evaluations of the last common bilaterian ancestor (lcba) currently suggest that it
resembled either a microscopic, non-segmented motile adult; or, on the contrary, a complex …

Echinoderms are characterized by a distinctive high-magnesium calcite endoskeleton as
adults, but elements of this have been drastically reduced in some groups. Herein, we …

Abstract The Cambrian and Ordovician radiations marked the origins of all major
echinoderm clades and established their Phanerozoic ecological blueprint. Recent claims of …