From Academic Kids

Sea star vs starfish

This page was earlier at sea star, and claimed that starfish was an incorrect synonym. These things aren't fish, but that doesn't make the term incorrect as such - compare with jellyfish. Also, the terms differ slightly in scope - starfish is sometimes used to include brittle stars, and sea star isn't - but I guess this difference isn't quite so common as I thought. I think starfish is the more common term, so I've moved the page here, but even if it isn't, it shouldn't be called wrong.

Well if you go to an aquarium they're careful to call them seastars" and "jellies". We should at the very least note in the article that they're not fish. -- Loren

Ta-da! :) -- Oliver P. 00:32 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

To those who defend the name seastar and protest, "but they aren't fish!": recall that neither are they stars. We are complicit in misnomer.

They aren't astronomical stars, but they are geometric stars.

Marine biologists consider "starfish" a deprecated name. Of course, it is a common name, and therefore should be in wikipedia, but redirected to "sea star", not the other way around. Using "sea star" consistently in the article would also be good. You can argue whether the deprecation is silly, but it is real. Let's make the official name "sea star" (assuming we don't want Asteroidea). It makes the biologists happier, and doesn't upset the average person too much. user:nereocystis 22 Nov, 2004.

"fish" used to refer to many creatures which live in the water, which is probably the source for starfish. This use of "fish" is uncommon today, and is another argument for preferring "sea star" over "starfish". From 1913 Webster:

A name loosely applied in popular usage to many animals of diverse characteristics, living in the water. "Starfish" may be more common then "sea star" and "seastar", according to a google search, but "sea star" should be used.

It seems that the comments on this page prefer "sea star". Would anyone seriously object to making this the standard? user:nereocystis 3 Dec 2004.

I expect to change "starfish" to "sea star" in one week, unless there is objection. Nereocystis 09:58, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Done. Now does anyone object to moving the article to 'sea star' and have 'starfish' redirect to 'sea star'? Nereocystis 01:02, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Google test: Sea star gets 11,900,000; starfish only gets 1,240,000. Tony Jin 04:26, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Sea star gets 11 900 000 without quotation marks, but by the 600th entry or so there are pages that don't mention the two words together. "Sea star" gets 195 000, and "sea stars" gets 84 500, considerably less than "starfish".

However, sea star is still preferred among scientists as a common name. I should provide a reference on this, but I don't have it yet. That is why many of us prefer sea star. There are 143,000 seastar references in google.Nereocystis 23:51, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Geological history

Added the ==Geological history== text from an article I originally in 1998 and published it on the Web....

Dlloyd 00:39, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Portions of this text are :

"Copyright © 1995-1997 The Fossil Company Ltd. © 1997-1999 The British Fossil Company Inc. and licensed by the owner under the terms of the Wikipedia copyright." Please contact me if you need further clarification on this.

Dlloyd 00:55, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Is ITIS authoritative?

The ITIS (http://www.itis.usda.gov/info.html), which I suppose is authoritative, classifies Asteroidea (http://www.itis.usda.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=156862) as a subclass of the class Stelleroidea (http://www.itis.usda.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=156858), so I adjusted the taxonomy to reflect this. k.lee 03:03, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

ITIS isn't necessarily authoritative, so things shouldn't be changed to match it. In this particular case, it looks like it doesn't match the system used here and in various other places, since it either doesn't recognize the class Concentricycloidea or refers to it by a very different name. Accordingly, I'm reverting the change.