Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
Sponges, the members of the phylum Porifera, are a basal animal clade as a sister of the diploblasts. They are multicellular organisms that have bodies full of pores and channels allowing water to circulate through them, consisting of jelly-like mesohyl sandwiched between two thin layers of cells.
Hexactinellid sponges are sponges with a skeleton made of four- and/or six-pointed siliceous spicules, often referred to as glass sponges. They are usually classified along with other sponges in the phylum Porifera, but some researchers consider them sufficiently distinct to deserve their own phylum, Symplasma. Some experts believe glass sponges are the longest-lived animals on earth; these scientists tentatively estimate a maximum age of up to 15,000 years.
Marine angelfish are perciform fish of the family Pomacanthidae. They are found on shallow reefs in the tropical Atlantic, Indian, and mostly western Pacific Oceans. The family contains seven genera and about 86 species. They should not be confused with the freshwater angelfish, tropical cichlids of the Amazon Basin.
Scallop is a common name that encompasses various species of marine bivalve mollusks in the taxonomic family Pectinidae, the scallops. However, the common name "scallop" is also sometimes applied to species in other closely related families within the superfamily Pectinoidea, which also includes the thorny oysters.
Nudibranchs are a group of soft-bodied marine gastropod molluscs that shed their shells after their larval stage. They are noted for their often extraordinary colours and striking forms, and they have been given colourful nicknames to match, such as "clown", "marigold", "splendid", "dancer", "dragon", and "sea rabbit". Currently, about 3,000 valid species of nudibranchs are known.
Filter feeders are a sub-group of suspension feeding animals that feed by straining suspended matter and food particles from water, typically by passing the water over a specialized filtering structure. Some animals that use this method of feeding are clams, krill, sponges, baleen whales, and many fish. Some birds, such as flamingos and certain species of duck, are also filter feeders. Filter feeders can play an important role in clarifying water, and are therefore considered ecosystem engineers. They are also important in bioaccumulation and, as a result, as indicator organisms.
Demosponges (Demospongiae) are the most diverse class in the phylum Porifera. They include 76.2% of all species of sponges with nearly 8,800 species worldwide. They are sponges with a soft body that covers a hard, often massive skeleton made of calcium carbonate, either aragonite or calcite. They are predominantly leuconoid in structure. Their "skeletons" are made of spicules consisting of fibers of the protein spongin, the mineral silica, or both. Where spicules of silica are present, they have a different shape from those in the otherwise similar glass sponges. Some species, in particular from the Antarctic, obtain the silica for spicule building from the ingestion of siliceous diatoms.
Chloranthaceae is a family of flowering plants (angiosperms), the only family in the order Chloranthales. It is not closely related to any other family of flowering plants, and is among the early-diverging lineages in the angiosperms. They are woody or weakly woody plants occurring in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Madagascar, Central and South America, and the West Indies. The family consists of four extant genera, totalling about 77 known species according to Christenhusz and Byng in 2016. Some species are used in traditional medicine. The type genus is Chloranthus. The fossil record of the family, mostly represented by pollen such as Clavatipollenites, extends back to the dawn of the history of flowering plants in the Early Cretaceous, and has been found on all continents.
Cypraeidae, commonly named the cowries, is a taxonomic family of small to large sea snails. These are marine gastropod mollusks in the superfamily Cypraeoidea, the cowries and cowry allies.
Suberites domuncula is a species of sea sponge belonging to the family Suberitidae.
Halwaxiida or halwaxiids is a proposed clade equivalent to the older orders Sachitida He 1980 and Thambetolepidea Jell 1981, loosely uniting scale-bearing Cambrian animals, which may lie in the stem group to molluscs or lophotrochozoa. Some palaeontologists question the validity of the Halwaxiida clade.
Aeolidia papillosa, known as the common grey sea slug, is a species of nudibranch in the family Aeolidiidae.
Helcionellid or Helcionelliformes is an order of small fossil shells that are universally interpreted as molluscs, though no sources spell out why this taxonomic interpretation is preferred. These animals are first found about 540 to 530 million years ago in the late Nemakit-Daldynian age, which is the earliest part of the Cambrian period. A single species persisted to the Early Ordovician. These fossils are component of the small shelly fossils (SSF) assemblages.
Chlamys hastata, the spear scallop, spiny scallop or swimming scallop, is a species of bivalve mollusc in the family Pectinidae found on the west coast of North America from the Gulf of Alaska to San Diego, California. A limited number of these scallops are harvested by divers or by narrow trawls off the west coast of Canada.
Suberites is a genus of sea sponges in the family Suberitidae. Sponges, known scientifically as Porifera, are the oldest metazoans and are used to elucidate the basics of multicellular evolution. These living fossils are ideal for studying the principal features of metazoans, such as extracellular matrix interactions, signal-receptor systems, nervous or sensory systems, and primitive immune systems. Thus, sponges are useful tools with which to study early animal evolution. They appeared approximately 580 million years ago, in the Ediacaran.
Pseudospongosorites is a genus of sea sponges belonging to the family Suberitidae. Currently, the genus is considered as monotypic, consisting of a single species Pseudospongosorites suberitoides. It is found in the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and on the Atlantic coast of the United States as far north as North Carolina. This species is known by the common name Florida hermit crab sponge, so named because hermit crabs often use it as shelter.
Dictyonellidae is a family of sponges in the order Bubarida, based on the genus DictyonellaSchmidt, 1868.
Basilemys is a large, terrestrial trionychoid turtle from the Upper Cretaceous. In Greek, the word "Basil" means royal or kingly and the word "Emys" means turtle. Therefore, Basilemys means King Turtle. Basilemys has been found in rocks dating to the Campanian and Maastrichtian subdivisions of the Late Cretaceous and is considered to be the largest terrestrial turtle of its time. Basilemys has solely been found in North America. The family Nanhsiungchelyidae, which is the family Basilemys belongs to, made its first appearance in the Lower Cretaceous, in what we now call Asia. Because of Basilemys, we know that this family appeared in North America in the Upper Cretaceous. It is possible that Basilemys and other nanhsiungchelyids are immigrants from Asia. They might have arrived in North America by passing through what we now call the Bering Strait somewhere during the Cretaceous. In an analysis made by Sukhanov et al. on a new Nansiunghelyid turtle from the Upper Cretaceous of Mongolia, it was demonstrated that Asian nanhsiungchelyids gave rise to the North American nanhsiungchelyids. Basilemys shares some traits with another member of nanhsiungchelyidae, Zangerlia, which is similar to Basilemys in, for example, skull proportions. However, Basilemys has a more complex triturating surface that includes well-defined pockets on the dentary, and it also has tooth-like projections on the triturating surface of the maxilla.
Coelosphaeridae is a family of sponges belonging to the order Poecilosclerida. Species are found across the globe.
