Today, the roughly 500 species are mostly known from deeper waters, 200 to 2,000 meters. The hexactinellids are exclusively marine.
These long-living, cold-water invertebrates trace their evolutionary history back more than 550 million years, predating the so-called Cambrian explosion when most of today’s animal lineages originated. Glass sponges are one of the oldest examples of complex life that survive today. Some experts believe glass sponges are the longest-lived animals on earth these scientists tentatively estimate a maximum age of up to 15,000 years. Their tissues contain glass-like structural particles, called spicules, that are made of silica (hence their name).
Glass sponges in the class Hexactinellida are animals commonly found in the deep ocean.
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