This article was originally featured on The Conversation. After four years of digging for fossils in a churchyard in York, Pennsylvania, amateur paleontologist Chris Haefner made an intriguing find.

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 ...

Ocean acidification, driven by the absorption of anthropogenic CO₂, is altering seawater chemistry by lowering pH and reducing carbonate ion availability. Echinoderms – including sea urchins, starfish ...

The end-Paleozoic witnessed the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's history so far, killing the majority of species and profoundly shaping the evolutionary history of the survivors.

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 ...

Researchers in Japan have finally observed living larvae of a sea lily, a marine invertebrate with a 500-million-year fossil record. The finding supports a century-old hypothesis about how the ...

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 ...

Marine disease dynamics in echinoderm populations have emerged as a critical focus owing to the ecological prominence of this phylum. Echinoderms, including sea stars and sea urchins, function as ...

Ophiothrix angulata, a widely recognized and prevalent ophiuroid species in the Western Atlantic, has long been the subject of taxonomic debate due to its remarkable morphological diversity. A new ...

You have to go to Echinoblog for #10 because who better to write about echinoderms than Doc Echinoderm. The quick and dirty of why these urchins make the list and begin our top 10? The top spines in ...