noun
definition
Any sea urchin or sea dollar of the class Echinoidea.
adjective
definition
Resembling a sea urchin.
Examples of echinoid in a Sentence
Neumayr adduced the Triassic sea-urchin Tiarechinus, in which the apical system forms half of the test, as an argument for the origin of Echinoidea from an ancestor in which the apical system was of great importance; but a genus appearing so late in time, in an isolated sea, under conditions that dwarfed the other echinoid dwellers therein, cannot seriously be thought to elucidate the origin of pre-Silurian Echinoidea, and the recent discovery of an intermediate form suggests that we have here nothing but degenerate descendants of a well-known Palaeozoic family (Lepidocentridae).
Thus the elements of the Pelmatozoan ventral groove are now detected in so different a structure as the echinoid ambulacrum, while an aboral nervous system, the diminished representative of that in crinoids, has been traced in all Eleutherozoa except Holothurians.
This would leave the Echinoid scheme remarkably simple, with the Melonitoida and Cidaroida as divergent branches from an ancestor like Bothriocidaris; but while the former branch soon decayed, the latter continues to flourish at the present day.
Derived fossils can be collected along the foreshore including echinoid 's in flint, shells and occasional mammal bones.
Ramsgate Behind the busy Port of Ramsgate, high Chalk Cliffs yield echinoid 's and shells.
The position of the pores near the centre of the ambulacrals in Bothriocidaris need not be regarded as primitive, since other early Palaeozoic genera, not to mention the young of living forms, show that the podia originally passed out between the plates, and were only gradually surrounded by their substance; thus the original structure of the echinoid ambulacra differed from that of the early asteroid in the position of the radial vessels and nerves, which here lie beneath the plates instead of outside them.