...there are barely 7,000 echinoderms.
More like this
It was a long, hard, and tumultuous battle, but the clash of the titans that began here at The Intersection--that will go down in science blogging history as the
You, me, your pet dog, and any other animal with a backbone are deuterostomes.
hmm... conservative estimates of arthropod species numbers start at 5 million...
That's 100,000 described buddy. Arthropod lovers always report the estimated "potential" number based on some beatle count in the tropics. How many assumptions does that model have anyway? Seriously, how many arthropods have been described?
I commented below, but they say here in several sources that 83% of described species are arthropods.
Crustacea alone have ~52,000 species described.
Don't let it bug you - mollusks are cool. Crabs think so too.