The Echinoid Directory

• Test ovate with no anterior sulcus at ambitus; rounded in profile.
• Apical disc ethmolytic, with 4 gonopores; central.
• Anterior ambulacrum narrow and weakly depressed adapically; pore-pairs specialised and uniserially arranged.
• Other ambulacra petaloid and weakly sunken, anterior petals only slightly longer than posterior petals and flexed outwards; anterior column with pore-pairs developed only in the more distal part; anterior and posterior columns made up of the same number of plates.
• Posterior petals shorter; weakly depressed and with both columns equally developed; perradial zone narrow and petals closed distally.
• Periproct on vertical, truncate face. Two or three subanal pore-pairs.
• Peristome large and D-shaped; labral plate weakly projecting and peristome facing largely downwards.
• Labral plate short and wide; not extending beyond first ambulacral plate; in broad contact with sternal plates.
• Aboral tuberculation fine, uniform and dense. Oral tubercles also dense and uniform.
• Well-developed peripetalous fasciole passing a few plates below the anterior petals (ca. 3-4 plates below end). Lateroanal fasciole present.

Eocene to Lower Miocene, North America, Middle East and circum-Mediterranean.

Paraster confusus Pomel [=Agassizia gibberulus Cotteau, 1876], by original designation.

• A. gibberulus (Cotteau, 1847); Eocene, southern Europe, North Africa.
• A. mossomi Cooke, 1942; Late Oligocene, USA.
• A. arabica Kier, 1972; Miocene, Dam Formation, Saudi Arabia.

Spatangoida, Paleopneustina, Prenasteridae.

Presumably paraphyletic (by exclusion of Agassizia Pomel).

Differs from Agassizia in having respiratory tube-feet (and associated pore-pairs) in the distal half of the anterior column of the anterior paired petals.

Mortensen, T. 1951 A. monograph of the Echinoidea. V. Spatangoida 2. C. A. Reitzel, Copenhagen.

Kier, P. M. 1980. The echinoids of the Middle Eocene Warley Hill Formation, Santee Limestone and Castle Hayne Limestone of North and South Carolina. Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology 39, 1-102.

Pomel, A. 1886. Note sur deux Echinides du terrain Eocène. Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France 14, 608-613.