Mineral-producing organisms exert exquisite control on all aspects of biomineral production. Among shell-bearing organisms, a wide range of mineral fabrics are developed reflecting diverse modes of life that require different material properties. Our knowledge of how biomineral structures relate to material properties is still limited because it requires the determination of these properties on...

Msx (/msh) family genes encode homeodomain (HD) proteins that control ontogeny in many animal species. We compared the structures of Msx genes from a wide range of Metazoa (Porifera, Cnidaria, Nematoda, Arthropoda, Tardigrada, Platyhelminthes, Mollusca, Brachiopoda, Annelida, Echiura, Echinodermata, Hemichordata, and Chordata) to gain an understanding of the role of these genes in phylogeny. Ex...

BACKGROUND Until today, only scattered species records of Brachiopoda from Greece have been included in publications on the Mediterranean brachiopod fauna. These records were mostly based on material collected during marine expeditions in the eastern Mediterranean decades ago, while few recent additional records appear in ecological studies. The aim of this paper was to give the first checklist...

Ectoprocts, phoronids and brachiopods are often dealt with under the heading Tentaculata or Lophophorata, sometimes with entoprocts discussed in the same chapter, for example in Ruppert and Barnes (1994). The Lophophorata is purported to be held together by the presence of a "lophophore," a mesosomal tentacle crown with an upstream-collecting ciliary band. However, the mesosomal tentacle crown ...