The Echinoid Directory

• Test small, cordate in outline and highly inflated; thick-shelled.
• Apical disc subcentral with four gonopores.
• Anterior genital plates fused; posterior oculars stretched and separated from posterior genital plates. Posterior gonopores opening on ocular plates II and IV so as to form compact apical disc.
• Frontal groove relatively wide; starts at apical disc and deepens to ambitus, continuing adorally.
• Paired ambulacra non-petaloid; pore-pairs rudimentary. Ambulacral plates tall and hexagonal aborally.
• Peristome small and oval; more or less at anterior border and facing forward into frontal groove.
• Plastron plating meridosternous - labral plate followed by single large and symmetrical sternal plate.
• Episternal plates opposite and equal.
• Plastron plating continuous.
• Aboral tuberculation fine and uniform.
• Subanal fasciole present.

Upper Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) to Palaeocene; Spain, France, Denmark, Austria, Caucasus, Crimea, Transcaspian, Dagestan, Kazakhstan.

Galeaster bertrandi Seunes, 1889, p. 822, by original designation.

• Poslavskaia and Moskvin (1960) recognized four species based on slight differences in test profile.

Holasteroida, Meridosternata, Urechinina, Pourtalesiidae.

Monotypic.

Differs from Basseaster in having a well-defined anterior sulcus and with the peristome positioned much closer to the anterior border.

Seunes, 1889. Bulletin de la Societe geologique de France serie 3 17, p. 821.

Poslavskaia, N. A. and Moskvin, M. M. 1960. Echinoids of the order Spatangoida in Danian and adjacent deposits of Crimea, Caucasus and the Transcaspian region. Pp. 47-82 in International Geological Congress XXI Session, Reports of Soveit Geologists, problem 5. The Cretaceous - Tertiary boundary. Publishing house of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow.

Jeffery, C. H. 1997. All change at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary? Echinoids from the Maastrichtian and Danian of the Mangyshlak Peninsula, Kazakhstan. Palaeontology 40, 659-712.

A. B. Smith & C. H. Jeffery 2000. Maastrichtian and Palaeocene echinoids: a key to world faunas. Special Papers in Palaeontology 63, 1-404.