Deuterostomes are the major division of animal life which includes sea stars, acorn worms,
and humans, among a wide variety of ecologically and morphologically disparate taxa …

Echinoderms are a major group of invertebrate deuterostomes that have been an important
component of marine ecosystems throughout the P hanerozoic. Their fossil record extends …

A major goal of biological classification is to provide a system that conveys phylogenetic
relationships while facilitating lucid communication among researchers. Phylogenetic …

Quantifying morphological evolution is key to determining the patterns and processes
underlying the origin of phyla. We constructed a hierarchical morphological character matrix …

The phylogenetic relationships between major groups of plesiomorphic pentaradial
echinoderms, the Paleozoic crinoids, blastozoans, and edrioasteroids, are poorly …

Macroevolutionary inference has historically been treated as a two-step process, involving
the inference of a tree, and then inference of a macroevolutionary model using that tree …

Phylogenetic relationships among early crinoids are evaluated by maximizing parsimonious‐
informative characters that are unordered and unweighted. Primarily T remadocian–D …

Despite their importance for understanding phylogeny, character evolution and
classification, well‐constrained homology relationships for posterior plating in crinoids have …

Abstract The Anti-Atlas contains a thick, volcanic-free Ordovician succession that originally
deposited in a passive-margin basin. Three main sedimentary packages are bounded by …

Echinoderms have evolved diverse and disparate morphologies throughout the
Phanerozoic. Among them, blastozoans, an extinct group of echinoderms that were an …