Brachiopoda 2025: A review and update

This review article on brachiopods is intended to serve several different research communities. First, those who do not study brachiopods — provide them with the basics of what they might need to know to be able to better understand and utilize brachiopods in their own research, whatever that may be. Second, those who have made a career of studying brachiopods — remind them of some older, classic, and still useful papers that might have been buried by the avalanche of newer research over the years. Third, those who are just beginning to learn about brachiopods to hopefully conduct research on them — help to provide some inroads into the vast expanse of research on brachiopods published over the past centuries and introduce some of the most recent studies from researchers around the world. We hope that it provides a snapshot in time of what we know today about brachiopods, extant and extinct.