Pelmatozoa Sentence Examples

The word "Pelmatozoa" literally means "stalked animals," but the name is now used to denote all Cystidea, Blastoidea, Crinoidea and Edrioasteroidea, as opposed to the other classes, which may be called Eleutherozoa.

Many Pelmatozoa have, it is true, no stalk, while some are freely-moving, but all agree in the possession of certain characters obviously connected with a fixed mode of life.

There are other features of most, if not all, Pelmatozoa that appear to be due to a fixed existence; but those are also found in the Eleutherozoa.

The Pelmatozoic theory thus regards the Pelmatozoa as the more ancestral forms, and the Pelmatozoan stage as one that must have been passed through by all Echinoderms during their evolution from the Dipleurula.

It might be possible to prove the origin of all classes from Pelmatozoa, without thereby explaining the origin of such fundamental features as radial symmetry, the developmental metamorphosis, and the torsion that affects both gut and body-cavities during that process; but the acceptance of a Dipleurula as the common ancestor necessitates an explanation of these features.

The evolution of the modern Echinoidea from their Palaeozoic ancestors is also well understood, but in this case the ancestral form to which the palaeontologist is led does not at first sight present many resemblances to the Pelmatozoa.

To this point we shall recur; palaeontology, though it suggests a clue, does not furnish an actual link either between Echinoidea and Asteroidea, or between those classes and Pelmatozoa.

Minute anatomical research has also aided to establish the Pelmatozoic theory by the gradual recognition in other classes of features formerly supposed to be confined to Pelmatozoa.

Pelmatozoa in which epithecal extensions of the food-grooves, ambulacrals, superficial oral nervous system, blood-vascular and water-vascular systems, coelom and genital system are continued exothecally upon jointed outgrowths of the abactinal thecal plates (brachia), carrying with them extensions of the abactinal nerve-system.