An extinct group of early echinoderms from the Paleozoic era that had fruit-like or irregular body shapes, known from fossils.
From Greek karpos (fruit) and -oidea (resembling), coined by paleontologists because these creatures' fossils resembled fruit. The suffix -oidea designates a taxonomic subclass.
Carpoidea were some of the weirdest creatures to ever live—they looked more like lumpy fruit with tentacles than anything we'd recognize as animals today, and they're our distant sea-creature cousins!
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