Acanthascus
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Porifera
- Class: Hexactinellida
- Order: Lyssacinosida
- Family: Rossellidae
- Genus: Acanthascus
Visual Description
Images in the TreeOfLife-200M dataset show specimens identified as Acanthascus (Rossellidae, Hexactinellida). These images typically depict thin, branching/supple sponge structures with a delicate, glass-spicule–like look rather than massive, thick tissues. Observations are consistent with a hexactinellid growth form in which skeletal elements are prominent and overall silhouettes can appear filamentous or lacy in photographs.
Taxonomic Notes
- Acanthascus* was described by Schulze (1886) and is listed as a genus in Rossellidae in major biodiversity databases. [2]
Phylogeny and Molecular Systematics
Molecular phylogenetic analyses of Porifera that incorporate complete SSU rRNA secondary-structure information have been applied across the three extant sponge classes, including Hexactinellida (the class containing Rossellidae and Acanthascus). These approaches use rRNA structural models to improve alignment and phylogenetic reconstruction accuracy for deep metazoan relationships. [3]
Gallery
References
- ↑ Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Hexactinellida / Lyssacinosida / Rossellidae / Acanthascus constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- ↑ Acanthascus Schulze, 1886. GBIF. https://www.gbif.org/species/2236195. Accessed 2026-07-09.
- ↑ Oliver Voigt; Dirk Erpenbeck; Gert Wörheide. Molecular evolution of rDNA in early diverging Metazoa: First comparative analysis and phylogenetic application of complete SSU rRNA secondary structures in Porifera. BMC Evolutionary Biology. 2008. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-8-69.