Trichoplax - Discovery

Discovery

Trichoplax was discovered in 1883 by the German zoologist Franz Eilhard Schulze, in a seawater aquarium at the Zoological Institute in Graz, Austria. The generic name is derived from the classical Greek θρίξ (thrix), "hair", and πλάξ (plax), "plate". The specific epithet adhaerens comes from Latin "adherent", reflecting its propensity to stick to the glass slides and pipettes used in its examination.

Although from the very beginning most researchers who studied Trichoplax in any detail realized that it had no close relationship to other animal phyla, the zoologist Thilo Krumbach published a hypothesis that Trichoplax is a form of the planula larva of the anemone-like hydrozoan Eleutheria krohni in 1907. Although this was refuted in print by Schulze and others, Krumbach's analysis became the standard textbook explanation, and nothing was printed in zoological journals about Trichoplax until the 1960s. In the 1960s and 1970s a new interest among researchers led to acceptance of Placozoa as a new animal phylum. Among the new discoveries was study of the early phases of the animals' embryonic development and evidence that the animals that people had been studying are adults, not larvae. This newfound interest also included study of the organism in nature (as opposed to aquariums).