placozoan
placozoan noun: any of a group of balloon-shaped marine organisms, of the phylum Placozoa, considered to be the simplest living animals.
Noun
placozoan (plural placozoans)
- Any of a group of balloon-shaped marine organisms, of the phylum Placozoa, considered to be the simplest living animals.
- Similarly, at Madang, Papua New Guinea, a small rhabdocoel flatworm crawling on a slide among placozoans was observed contacting a placozoan, recoiling vigorously, and changing its direction of movement only to encounter another placozoan and repeat this behavior several times.2010, Vicki Buchsbaum Pearse, Oliver Voigt, 12: Field Biology of Placozoans (Trichoplax), Rob Desalle, Bernd Schierwater (editors), Key Transitions in Animal Evolution, Taylor & Francis (CRC Press)...
- Although ciliates, nematodes and are other small animals are observed around or even on placozoans, they do not seem to elicit any response (Pearse and Voigt, 2007).2018, Fatik Baran Mandal, Biology of Non-chordates, 2nd edition, PHI Learning, page 112
- Synonyms:
- placozoon
Synonyms of placozoan
Forms of placozoan
| plural | placozoans |
|---|
Origin of placozoan
Placozoa + -an; compare protozoan, protozoon.
Questions about placozoan
- What does placozoan mean?
- Placozoan means any of a group of balloon-shaped marine organisms, of the phylum Placozoa, considered to be the simplest living animals.
- What part of speech is placozoan?
- Placozoan is a noun.
- What is the plural of placozoan?
- The plural of placozoan is placozoans.
Words near placozoan in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: placozoan (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “placozoan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/placozoan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.