Monday 20 November (Indoor Meeting): 'Origins of Starfish and their relatives'. Speaker: Aaron Hunter.
Asterozoans, including starfish and their close relatives, the brittle stars, are amongst the most instantly recognisable and iconic marine animals. They are a dominant and successful group of living echinoderms based on their diversity, abundance and global distribution. Despite their ecological success and a fossil record spanning more than 480 million years, the early evolution of asterozoans remains a mystery. New discoveries from France and Morocco have begun to resolve this mystery. We look at the earliest common ancestors of the 'Bat Star' somasteroids and their Cambrian descendants, including a new fossil from the exceptionally preserved Fezouata biota in Morocco, which is the earliest starfish-like animal so far recorded in the fossil record. We then follow these exceptional fossils through the Ordovician, as true starfish and brittle stars appear and show how they rapidly diversified during the biotic revolution we call the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.
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