Armored worm reveals the ancestry of three major animal groups

An international team of scientists, including from the Universities of Bristol and Oxford, and the Natural History Museum, have discovered that a well-preserved, fossilized worm dating from 518 million years ago resembles ...

Brachiopods resilient to past environmental change

A new study concludes that a seafloor dwelling marine invertebrate is more resilient to environmental change than expected. The paper, led by researchers at British Antarctic Survey, is published today in the journal Global ...

Biologists discovered the pathwaysof groups of the lophophore

Scientists from Moscow State University have proved that lophophorates - the invertebrates with special tentacular apparatus - are relatives. Scientists have examined some representatives of one of the phylum of this group. ...

'Living fossil' genome decoded

A group of scientists from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), Nagoya University, and the University of Tokyo decoded the first lingulid brachiopod genome, from Lingula anatina collected ...

The evolutionary secrets of the brachiopod shell

Researchers of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have carried out the first detailed study of the molecular mechanisms responsible for formation of the brachiopod shell. Comparison with shell synthesis in other ...

Counting calories in the fossil record

Starting about 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, brachiopod groups disappeared in large numbers, along with 90 percent of the planet's species. Today, only a few groups, or genera, of brachiopods remain. ...

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