Villebrunaster

Villebrunaster
Temporal range: Early Ordovician,
~480 Ma
↓
Fossil of V. thorali
Fossil holotype of V. fezouataensis
Scientific classification
Kingdom:
Animalia
Phylum:
Echinodermata
Subphylum:
Asterozoa
Order:
†Somasteroidea
Family:
†Villebrunasteridae

Fell, 1963[1]
Genus:
†Villebrunaster

Spencer, 1951
Type species
†Villebrunaster thorali
Spencer, 1951
Other species
  • †V. fezouataensis (Hunter & Ortega-Hernández, 2021)
Synonyms
  • Ampullaster Fell, 1963
  • Cantabrigiaster Hunter & Ortega-Hernández, 2021

Villebrunaster is an extinct genus of starfish-like animal belonging to Asterozoa that lived around 480 million years ago during Early Ordovician Period in modern-day southern France and Morocco. As of 2022, it contains two species, namely V. thorali and V. fezouataensis.[2] V. thorali was described in 1951 and V. fezouataensis was described in 2021. Villebrunaster represents one of the oldest members of asterozoans, and perhaps, according to a description in 2021, the earliest divergent stem-group (ancestral members) of Asterozoa.[3]

  1. ^ H. B. Fell. (1963). A new family and genus of Somasteroidea. Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Zoology 3(13):143-146
  2. ^ Blake, Daniel B.; Hotchkiss, Frederick H.C. (2022). "Origin of the subphylum Asterozoa and redescription of a Moroccan Ordovician somasteroid". Geobios. 72–73: 22–36. doi:10.1016/j.geobios.2022.07.002.
  3. ^ Hunter, Aaron W.; Ortega-Hernández, Javier (2021). "A new somasteroid from the Fezouata Lagerstätte in Morocco and the Early Ordovician origin of Asterozoa". Biology Letters. 17 (1): 20200809. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2020.0809. PMC 7876607. PMID 33465330.