Anatomy
Velvet worms are segmented creatures with a flattened cylindrical body cross-section and rows of unstructured body appendages known as lobopods (informally: stub feet). The animals grow to between 0.5 and 20 cm (.25 to 8 in), with the average being about 5 cm (2 in), and have between 13 and 43 pairs of legs. Their skin consists of numerous, fine transverse rings and is often inconspicuously coloured orange, red or brown, but sometimes also bright green, blue, gold or white, and occasionally patterned with other colours.
Segmenting—outwardly inconspicuous and identifiable only in the regular spacing of the pairs of legs—is visible in the regular arrangement of skin pores, excretion organs and concentrations of nerve cells. The individual body sections are largely unspecialised; even the head develops only a little differently from any abdominal segment. Segmentation is apparently specified by the same gene as traceable in other groups of animals and is activated in each case, during embryonic development, at the rear border of each segment and in the growth zone of the stub feet.
Read more about this topic: Onychophora
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