Asteridea

The story

This plate from Kunstformen der Natur assembles twelve starfish species (Asteridea) at wildly varying scales and orientations — some shown whole, some in cross-section, one reduced to its bare skeletal plate structure — a compositional strategy Haeckel used throughout the atlas to turn a taxonomic survey into something closer to a decorative panel. Haeckel drew from specimens gathered on his own research voyages, particularly a formative expedition to the Mediterranean and Red Sea early in his career that convinced him marine invertebrates held the clearest evidence for his evolutionary theories. What to notice: the radial five-point symmetry that makes starfish instantly recognizable is exactly the kind of mathematical regularity in living form that obsessed Haeckel — he saw it as proof that nature followed aesthetic law as rigorously as physical law.