This creature displays an almost unexampled frequency and extent of distribution in the whole North Sea, in the western parts of the Baltic, near the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and the English coasts, so that it may be regarded as a characteristic North Sea echinoderm form.
This echinoderm is a simultaneous hermaphrodite (male gonads and mature eggs occurring together ).
Mucronalia, foot reduced, but still operculate, eyes present, animal fixed by its very long proboscis which is deeply buried in the tissues of an Echinoderm, no pseudopallium.
Eschscholtz at the Marshall Islands in 1825, Balanoglossus was described as a worm-like animal belonging to the Echinoderm order of Holothurians or sea-cucumbers.
The problem of the interrelations of the classes will thus be reduced to its simplest terms, and even questions as to the nature of the primitive Echinoderm and its affinity to the ancestors of other phyla may become more than exercises for the ingenuity of youth.