And it’s an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding bilaterean evolution and figuring out how strange creatures like echinoderms relate to creatures like us.
Crinoids became the most abundant echinoderms of the Ordovician, and some were the ancestors of today's stalkless feather stars and stalked sea lilies.
Most of the main groups of the animal kingdom—arthropods, brachiopods, coelenterates, echinoderms, molluscs and even chordates, the branch from which vertebrates went on to develop—are found in the fossil beds of the Cambrian.
The first radially symmetrical echinoderm known from the fossil record is Camptostroma, which showed up between 516 and 513 million years ago in Pennsylvania.
Beginning about 240 million years ago, and continuing through the Late Triassic and Jurassic, starfishes diversified rapidly to become among the most common echinoderms, second only to the brittle stars.