Relatives of starfish, brittle stars spend most of their time hiding under rocks and crevices in the ocean or burrowing in the sand. These shy marine creatures have no brain to speak of -- just nerve ...

As mist lingers over a Swedish fjord lined with towering, forested cliffs, a group of scientists collect mud from the bottom of the turquoise-colored waters. They’re after brittle stars—marine animals ...

The paper J. Delroisse et al., “A puzzling homology: A brittle star using a putative cnidarian-type luciferase for bioluminescence,” Open Biology, 7:160300, 2017. Degrees of separation Although the ...

A team of paleontologists from Germany and Austria reports that a brittle star fossil found in Germany shows evidence of clonal fragmentation 150 million years ago. Their paper is published in the ...