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How many living species of lamp shells are known?
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lamp shells
Lamp shells on the sea floor off the coast of Massachusetts.
There are approximately 300 living species of lamp shells (phylum Brachiopoda) currently known to science.1
While these marine invertebrates are no longer as numerous as they once were, they have a vast evolutionary history, with more than 30,000 extinct species described in the fossil record dating back to the Cambrian Period.21