Aristotle Lantern in Echinoderms

What Is Aristotle's Lantern?

Our seas are filled with popular creatures – as well as those that are lesser known. This includes creatures and their unique body parts. One of them that has a unique body part and name are sea urchins. The term Aristotle's lantern refers to the mouth of sea urchins. Some people say, however, that it does not solely refer to the mouth alone, but the entire animal.

Where Did the Name Aristotle's Lantern Come From?

It's a funky name for a marine creature body part. This structure was named for Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, scientist and teacher who described the structure in his book Historia Animalium, or The History of Animals. In this book, he referred to the "mouth-apparatus" of the urchin as looking like a "horn lantern." Horn lanterns at the time were five-sided lanterns made up of panes of thin pieces of horn.

Horn lantern

The horn was thin enough for light to shine out, but strong enough to protect a candle from the wind. Later, scientists referred to the urchin's mouth structure as Aristotle's lantern, and the name has stuck thousands of years later.

This complex structure is composed of five triangular, pointed teeth which function in grinding and grasping plant or animal plankton food. There are five basic sockets with fifteen other calcareous figures surrounding the pharynx. The plates are connected by muscles. Creatures use their Aristotle's lantern, or mouths, to scrape algae off rocks and other surfaces, as well as biting and chewing prey.

The mouth apparatus is capable of retracting into the urchin's body, as well as moving from side to side. During feeding, the five jaws are pushed out so that the mouth opens. When the urchin wants to bite, the jaws come together to grip the prey or algae and then can tear or chew by moving their mouth from side to side.

The top part of the structure is where new tooth material is formed. In fact, it grows at the rate of 1 to 2 millimeters per week. At the bottom end of the structure, there is a hard point called the distal tooth. Although this point is rigid, it has a weak outer layer that allows it to sharpen itself while it is scraping.