Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Excerpt from The Journal of the Linnean Society, Vol. 23: Zoology
Echinodermata with a solid or slightly flexible test covering the viscera, variable in shape from spheroidal to flat, composed of numerous, closely placed, more or less geometrical plates of car bonate of lime, covered with soft structures and carrying spines. Most of the plates arranged in several vertical series, reaching from the mouth to the dorso-central or apical system, constituting five ambulacral and five interradial areas. Other plates in the dorso-central system - the basal and radial and anal plates. With a mouth on the under or actinal surface, rarely in front of the test, and an internal gullet and intestinal tract ending externally in an anus, which is either placed in the dorso-central system or somewhere in the posterior interradium. A madreporite body placed in the dorso-central system and in relation with a renal organ and with the water-system, which is partly within the test and partly external, in the form of branchiae and branchial tentacles. With or without five teeth in jaw-pieces, which are moved by muscles connected with a connected or disconnected perignathic girdle.
Unisexual or bisexual; the genital glands with ducts perforating the basal plates or Opening beyond them; the young, either under going metamorphoses and being free-swimmers, or found perfect upon the parent's test.
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