All Extinct Invertebrate Families

Extinct Invertebrate Families is a Browse By group of the Nature Atlas that gathers families of invertebrate animals that are known only from fossils, such as Strabopidae, a family of poorly preserved Cambrian arthropods placed in its own order, and Orthidae, a family of brachiopods whose shells are marked with radial ridges and that died out in the Early Devonian. An entry belongs here when its own cited article describes a family that has no living members. It excludes the families that still have living species, such as the corals, the cephalopods, the spiders, the horseshoe crabs and the hermit crabs, which have groups of their own. The group lets a reader compare lineages that left only fossils.