AnimaliaacceptedsubkingdomAccepted
Agnotozoa

Agnotozoa

Moore et al., 1952

GBIF:165236976

0year

ABOUT

Descriptions(1)

Agnotozoa is the name of a taxon of simple animals. The name first appeared in an invertebrate paleontology book as one of the "branches" of the subkingdom Metazoa. The branch contained only one group: Mesozoa. More recently, some have used the name to refer to a sub-kingdom of three small phyla of simple animals without organs. These phyla are Placozoa, Orthonectida, and Rhombozoa. They still have differentiated tissue, but that tissue is only organized in simple ways; for example, by being layered. The Orthonectida and Rhombozoa are also grouped into the Mesozoa. Biologists today generally do not use the taxon Agnotozoa. There are a few likely reasons for this.

There is doubt that placozoans are closely related to mesozoans. There is doubt even that the two mesozoan groups (orthonectids and rhombozoans) are related to each other. Even if the two mesozoan groups are related, there is little need for another name in addition to mesozoa.

Wikispecies places the mesozoans in kingdom protista.
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CLASSIFICATION

Taxonomic Classification Tree

AnimaliaAgnotozoa

MULTIMEDIA

Media Files(1)

Trichoplax adhaerens.

Imageimage/jpeg© Oliver VoigtCREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION SHARE ALIKE 2.0 GERMANYOliver Voigt

IMAGES

Gallery(1)

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Occurrences with images

Source Information

English Wikipedia - Species Pages

checklist
Species pages extracted from the English Wikipedia article XML dump from 2022-08-02. Multimedia, vernacular names and textual descriptions are extracted, but only pages with a taxobox or speciesbox template are recognized. See https://github.com/mdoering/wikipedia-dwca for details.

Döring M (2022). English Wikipedia - Species Pages. Wikimedia Foundation. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/c3kkgh accessed via GBIF.org on 2026-06-14.

LicensePublished 8/2/2022View dataset
GBIF Usage Key
165236976
Dataset Key
cbb6498e-8927-405a-916b-576d00a6289b
Origin
source
Taxon ID
873368
Last Crawled
6/4/2026
Last Interpreted
6/4/2026