Velvet worms
| Onychophora Temporal range: Cenomanian–present |
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| An Oroperipatus species | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Subkingdom: | Eumetazoa |
| Clade: | Bilateria |
| Clade: | Nephrozoa |
| (unranked): | Protostomia |
| Superphylum: | Ecdysozoa |
| (unranked): | Panarthropoda |
| Phylum: |
Onychophora Grube, 1853 |
| Class: |
Udeonychophora Poinar, 2000 |
| Subgroups | |
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Order: Euonychophora
Order: †Ontonychophora
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| Global range of Onychophora: extant Peripatidae in green, Peripatopsidae in red, and fossils in black (click to enlarge) | |
Order: Euonychophora
Order: †Ontonychophora
Onychophora (from Ancient Greek, onyches, "claws"; and pherein, "to carry"), commonly known as velvet worms (due to their velvety texture and somewhat wormlike appearance) or more ambiguously as peripatus (after the first described genus, Peripatus), is a phylum of elongate, soft-bodied, many-legged Panarthropods. In appearance they have variously been compared to worms with legs, caterpillars, and slugs. They prey upon smaller animals such as insects, which they catch by squirting an adhesive slime. Approximately 200 species have been described, although the true number of species is likely greater. The two extant families of velvet worms are Peripatidae and Peripatopsidae. They show a peculiar distribution, with the peripatids being predominantly equatorial and tropical, while the peripatopsids are all found south of the equator. It is the only phylum within animalia that is wholly endemic to terrestrial environments. Velvet worms are considered close relatives of the Arthropoda and Tardigrada, with which they form the taxon Panarthropoda. This makes them of palaeontological interest, as they can help reconstruct the ancestral arthropod. In modern zoology, they are particularly renowned for their curious mating behaviour and for bearing live young.
Velvet worms are segmented animals with a flattened cylindrical body cross-section and rows of unstructured body appendages known as oncopods or lobopods (informally: stub feet). The animals grow to between 0.5 and 20 cm (.2 to 8 in), with the average being about 5 cm (2 in), and have between 13 and 43 pairs of legs. Their skin consists of numerous, fine transverse rings and is often inconspicuously coloured orange, red or brown, but sometimes also bright green, blue, gold or white, and occasionally patterned with other colours. Segmentation is outwardly inconspicuous, and identifiable by the regular spacing of the pairs of legs and in the regular arrangement of skin , excretion organs and concentrations of nerve cells. The individual body sections are largely unspecialised; even the head develops only a little differently from the abdominal segments. Segmentation is apparently specified by the same gene as in other groups of animals, and is activated in each case, during embryonic development, at the rear border of each segment and in the growth zone of the stub feet. Although Onychophorans fall within the protostome group, their early development has a deuterostome trajectory, (with the mouth and anus forming separately); this trajectory is concealed by the rather sophisticated processes which occur in early development.
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Wikipedia