Abstract
The Phylum Arthropoda includes the overwhelming majority of living animal species, and arthropods are among the earliest body fossils of which we have record. Their importance as members of all the major biotic communities throughout the Phanerozoic would be hard to overestimate. Arthropods have variously become deposit feeders, filter feeders, scavengers, predators, or parasites. Their generally small size means that they can derive a livelihood from any environment, from the interstitial habitat between sedimentary particles to the nutrient-poor desert. They can occupy positions low in the food chain as direct plankton feeders, such as copepods, or they can be important predators, limited only by the fact that arthropod construction places an upper limit on size. Arthropods are united by having an exoskeleton, which is molted to allow size increase. The exoskeleton is usually made of chitin, but with calcium carbonate, or even calcium phosphate, as an important component in some groups. The characteristically jointed limbs give the phylum its name, but there are other uniting characters, such as the possession of a hemocoel, and the common occurrence of compound eyes. There is considerable debate about whether the arthropods constitute a monophyletic group. They share bilateral symmetry and serial segmentation with a larger group including Annelida.
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Briggs, D.E.G., Fortey, R.A. (1992). The Early Cambrian Radiation of Arthropods. In: Lipps, J.H., Signor, P.W. (eds) Origin and Early Evolution of the Metazoa. Topics in Geobiology, vol 10. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2427-8_10
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