Rich Mooi studies the origin and evolution of echinoderms; a group that includes sea urchins and starfish, and has spent decades charting the relationships between these highly diverse organisms. He is the Curator of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology at the California Academy of Sciences.
For more than 30 years, Mooi has been steadily filling in and building onto the phylogenetic tree of echinoderms, the enigmatic and rarely studied group of invertebrates that includes sea urchins, starfish, brittle stars, sand dollars, sea lilies, and sea cucumbers. The process of identifying important connections among various species of a phylum with a massive fossil record requires just this sort of painstaking observation, and Mooi is an expert at noticing similarities (and differences) down to the cellular level.
Echinoderms are among the oldest creatures on Earth, with a fossil record that goes back to the Cambrian period, about 550 million years ago. They can be found just about everywhere, even Antarctica—in fact, they’re surprisingly abundant in some of the world’s coldest oceans. Mooi, along with longtime research partner Bruno David, has been tracing the evolutionary steps that led to present-day echinoderms and is working on determining the hallmarks of what makes an echinoderm an echinoderm. “We now have this system that is a complete set of comparative bases for all of the different groups of the echinoderms,” Mooi says. “That’s led us to this really amazing view of how these organisms came to look the way they do.”
Join us for what will be a fascinating discussion about some of our favorite species.
DIVE IN with Liz and Sylvia is a casual, free-flowing, and educational conversation and encourages ocean and nature enthusiasts of all ages to join. Sylvia, Liz, and Rich will take questions via Q & A text from the attendees. Get your questions ready!
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Presented by Ocean Elders.
Register for the event in this link.