dollars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, crinoids and more.
The echinoderms are an ancient group of animals that date back more than half a billion years in time. This diverse phylum with over 7,000 living species includes sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars, sea cucumbers, and sea lilies (also known as crinoids). The living echinoderms are all pentaradial, meaning they follow a pattern where the parts of the animal branch out into five distinct compartments, or arms. Way back in the paleozoic though there were some bizarre, very funky looking asymmetrical forms. It was real delight drawing all these beautiful and sometimes odd forms. I was drawn to the idea originally because I had envisioned a sea star covered shirt, and ended up with so much more. Weirdly, echinoderms are the closest evolutionary group related to the vertebrates, we backboned animals. That’s because we both are deuterstomes, which means that in the very earliest stages of life the anal region develops before the mouth region, which brings to mind many a bad joke. Their larvae are also very similar to proto-chordates.