The Echinoblog: The Encyclopedia of Life-Echinoderm Edition!

Today, I thought I would give everyone some space to introduce my friends over at the Encyclopedia of Life!

The EOL is a huge biodiversity database whose current ambition seems to be to be THE Number one clearing house for information on ALL organisms on the planet-from protists to plants and from archeans to echinoderms!

There's a lot of different databases of critters out there-and by my reckoning- EOL does try to include all aspects of information from taxonomy and information for the scientific professional to basic information for the public.

EOL receives information from many different "content partners" that feed the information on each page. The taxonomy from Marine Species.org (aka WoRMS), or the basic info from the Tree of Life Web project. EOL has just recently uploaded MANY new images to the database!

Given, just how many individual taxa of critters/plants/whatever that exist on Earth, many of the individual entries are a work in progress and we can see the project progressing for quite some time..

Here are screen grabs of each echinoderm page by Class which are each linked to the respective EOL page!
Here is the main Echinodermata page..

Some 4,923 images of echinoderms are present! I don't believe fossils are quite yet part of their repetoir as yet though...

The Asteroidea (sea stars aka starfish) 1877 images!!