Millions of years ago during the Silurian period, the Sahara Desert was a shallow sea full of aquatic animals like crinoids. Don’t be fooled! Crinoids are commonly called "sea lilies" but they aren't plants! They are echinoderms, like starfish and sea urchins, and many species are still alive today!
Reminder I'm recruiting a graduate student to join my lab group in fall '25. My lab uses fossils, fieldwork, & phylogenetic methods to study macroevolutionary processes in marine invertebrates, especially echinoderms. Please share & feel free to reach out! 🧪⚒️
Which is probably good, because I would have been much slower at doing the thing at the time because while I was a software engineer I had never written web code, which is a whole new satchel of echinoderms. Lo and behold, we did the thing, and we got something usable in about 6 weeks.
Wow! I love deep sea creatures! I especially like echinoderms💖💖
The earliest echinoderms—among the first organisms that developed mobility—looked very different from today’s specimens (eg starfish and sea urchins). How did they move? A soft robot helps find out @Katherineskipper.bsky.socialbuff.ly/4ekf595
A soft robot replica solves a mystery about the evolution of movement.
Stars both above and below, what are the chances of a perfect reflection? Did you know that echinoderms Starfish are also known as asteroids due to being in the class Asteroidea? Such wonders, when we look a little deeper. — ER art: The Shore — Barry McGlashan, 2023, oil on paper over panel ㅤ
📝In our latest paper, we talk about how seawater composition (specifically, Mg/Ca ratio) affects mechanical properties of sea urchin spines. Here’s the link: www.nature.com/articles/s43...#echinoderms#biominerals
Oceanic chemistry changes have made echinoderm skeletons weaker, making them more prone to damage from physical disturbances, predatory attacks, and taphonomic processes, according to experimental, ge...