Superphylum

Superphylum is the Taxa subcategory of the Nature Atlas for taxa ranked as superphyla, the large clades of related phyla that sit above the phylum level in the classification of animals. An entry belongs here when its own cited article gives its rank as a superphylum, such as Ecdysozoa, the moulting animals that include the arthropods and the roundworms, and Spiralia, the spiral-cleaving animals that include the molluscs, the annelid worms and the flatworms. It excludes single phyla, which have their own subcategory, and clades that are ranked as classes, orders or any other level. The rank is used for deep animal groupings that unite several phyla on the strength of shared development and molecular evidence, so the entries gathered here show how the phyla of the animal kingdom are related to one another.