Talk:Agnotozoa

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[edit] Acceptance of Agnotozoa

I was looking for more information to add to this article and the only instances of Agnotozoa that I can find all seem to be wikipedia clones. I think this is odd for something as important as a subkingdom. Is this truly a scientifically accepted classification?Remuel 18:49, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)????

Good question. Agnotozoa doesn't seem to be widely used by biologists today. A search for the name in Biological Abstracts turns up nothing. The term does make a historical appearance, though, in the book Invertebrate Fossils by Moore, Lalicker, & Fisher, 1952. A phylum-level classification on page 17 divides the animals into the subkingdoms Eozoa (protozoans) and Metazoa. The latter is further divided into three "branches": Agnotozoa, Parazoa, and Eumetazoa. Unlike the Wikipedia article, the Agnotozoa of Moore et al. includes only Mesozoa (Orthonectida & Rhombozoa) and makes no mention of Placozoa.

Although there is precedent for the taxon Agnotoza, there seems to be no compelling reason to regard it as a clade, or even a useful grade group. It may make the taxobox more tidy, but that's not reason enough to keep it in an encyclopedia article. I suggest we remove the name from the Animal article, but retain the Agnotozoa article as an example of taxonomic history.

Cephal-odd 23:14, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Placozoan pictures

• I'm going to add the picture from placozoa to the info box to make it more pretty.Werothegreat 15:44, 23 October 2006 (UTC)