After the discovery of whale fall communities in modern oceans, it has been hypothesized that during the Mesozoic the carcasses of marine reptiles created similar habitats supporting long-lived and specialized animal communities. Here, we report a fully documented ichthyosaur fall community, from a Late Jurassic shelf setting, and reconstruct the ecological succession of its micro- and macrofau...

Camarodont sea urchins possess a rapidly evolving actin gene family whose members are expressed in distinct cell lineages in a developmentally regulated fashion. Evolutionary changes in the actin gene family of echinoids include alterations in number of family members, site of expression, and gene linkage, and a dichotomy between rapidly and slowly evolving isoform-specific 3' untranslated regi...

It has been argued that increases in predation over geological time should result in increases in defensive adaptations in prey taxa. Recent in situ and laboratory observations indicate that cidaroid sea urchins feed on live stalked crinoids, leaving distinct bite marks on their skeletal elements. Similar bite marks on fossil crinoids from Poland strongly suggest that these animals have been su...

This paper is primarily intended as a guide to researchers who wish to know what echinoid species are available in the Bay of Panama and in the Gulf of Chiriqui, how to recognize them, and what has been published about them up to 2004. Fifty seven species of echinoids have been reported in the literature as occurring in the Pacific waters of Panama, of which I have collected and examined 31, in...

Quaternary sediments along the southernmost portion of the Brazilian coast are rich in fossil remains of various terrestrial and marine organisms. This paper presents a description of fossil irregular clypeasteroid echinoids found in this area, with observations on their taphonomy. The identified taxa are Encope emarginata (Leske) and Mellita quinquiesperforata (Leske), although the latter is v...

Examination of a large collection of echinothurioid echinoids from museum collections in New Zealand and Australia revealed six new species in the genus Araeosoma (A. bidentatum sp. nov., A. migratum sp. nov., A. anatirostrum sp. nov., A. tertii sp. nov., A. leppienae sp. nov., and A. bakeri sp. nov.) and one in the genus Hapalosoma (H. amynina sp. nov.), while the recorded presence of A. coria...

BACKGROUND Research on echinoderms in Mexico began in the late nineteenth century. We present a dataset that includes the taxonomic and geographic information of irregular echinoids from Mexico, housed in four collections: 1) Colección Nacional de Equinodermos "Ma. Elena Caso Muñoz" from the Instituto de Ciencias del Mar y Limnología (ICML), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM); 2) In...

A new genus and new species of eumedonine crab, Cebudonus poppeorum, is described from the central Philippines. Superficially similar to Eumedonus H. Milne Edwards, 1834, Gonatonotus White, 1847, Zebrida White, 1847, Zebridonus Chia, Ng & Castro, 1995, and Tiaramedon Chia & Ng, 1998, Cebudonus n. gen. is easily characterised by possessing two long pseudorostral spines, a gently convex and unarm...

Cooption and modularity are informative concepts in evolutionary developmental biology. Genes function within complex networks that act as modules in development. These modules can then be coopted in various functional and evolutionary contexts. Hormonal signaling, the main focus of this review, has a modular character. By regulating the activities of genes, proteins and other cellular molecule...

This dataset inventories occurrence records of fossil echinoid specimens collected in the Calcaires à Spatangues Formation (CSF) that crops out in the southeast of the Paris Basin (France), and is dated from the Acanthodiscus radiatus chronozone (ca. 132 Ma, early Hauterivian, Early Cretaceous). Fossil richness and abundance of the CSF has attracted the attention of palaeontologists since the m...