The Echinoid Directory

• Test ovate withouta frontal groove.
• Apical disc ethmolytic, with 4 gonopores.
• Anterior ambulacrum narrow and very slightly sunken; pore-pairs small, simple isopores.
• Other ambulacra petaloid; petals narrow and sunken, the anterior pair flexed anteriorly. Petals subequal in length. Occluded plates at tips of petals.
• Periproct large, on short vertical truncate face; bound orally by plates 5.a.5, 5.b.5.
• Peristome wider than long; kidney-shaped; facing downwards.
• Labral plate short and wide; not extending beyond ambulacral plate 1.
• Sternal plates long and parallel-sided; episternal plates forming a significant part of the plastron.
• Periplastronal zones narrow, weakly bowed.
• Spines and tubercles within peripetalous fasciole often sightly larger, especially adapically, but tubercles not sunken.
• Well-developed subanal fasciole and peripetalous faciole. Subanal fasciole shield-shaped and with anal branches. Peripetalous fasciole indented behind anterior petals and in anterior interambulacra.

Miocene to Recent; Egypt, Indian Ocean.

Eobrissus townsendi Bell, 1904, p. 236, by original designation.

• Metalia (Eobrissus) gneffensis Fourtau, 1913; Miocene (Vidobonian), Egypt.
• M. (E.) townsendi Bell, 1904; Recent, Indian Ocean.

Spatangoida, Micrasterina, Brissidae.

Subjective junior synonym of Metalia Gray, 1855.

Differs from the type species of Metalia in lacking a distinct frontal groove. Mortensen (1951) considered this difference trivial and treated Eobrissus as a junior synonym of Metalia.

Bell, F. J. 1904. Description of a new genus of spatangid. Annals and Magazine of Natural History (series 7) 13, 236-237.
 

Mortensen, T. 1951. A monograph of the Echinoidea. V. Spatangoida 2. C. A. Reitzel, Copenhagen.