Posted: Jul 27, 2010 5:24 am
Latimeria wrote:Good post, Rumraket. But I have a question. As far as I know there are no sponges with even the most rudimentary circulatory system. Was the phylum Porifera just chosen for purposes of illustrating the general concept (in which case I am totally with you), or is there a specific reason that leads you to speculate that it began with sponges? Just curious.
EDIT: Just wanted to point out for Steve's benefit the lack of "groupthink" in this instance, and predict that Rumraket's response will be conducive to coherent and logical conversation in contrast to Steve's myriad ways of ruining productive discussion.
You are of course right, sponges don't have circulatory systems and it seems I have picked a bad example on that basis. I knew sponges belong to one of the most distantly related phyla, courtesy of having asked that question here on this site somewhere before.
A little bit of googling would have corrected that mistake. I was also thinking jellyfish or things in that category, basically the criteria in my mind was just "early multicellular". Anyway, I like the word sponge
