Notable sports deaths in 2016. A look at those athletes, coaches and sports personalities we lost in 2016. Keion Carpenter. Keion Carpenter, a former NFL player and Virginia Tech defensive back and special teams standout died Thursday, Dec. 29, 2016 in Miami, the school announced. He was 39 and the cause of death is unknown.
Members of the phylum Chordata are bilaterally symmetric, deuterostome coelomates, and the vertebrate chordates display segmentation. Hemichordata, which includes the acorn worms, has been presented as a fourth chordate subphylum, but it now is usually treated as a separate phylum. It, along with the phylum Echinodermata, which includes starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers and their kin, are the chordates' closest relatives.
By Phil Myers. Chordates are defined as organisms that possess a structure called a notochord, at least during some part of their development. The notochord is a rod that extends most of the length of the body when it is fully developed. Lying dorsal to the gut but ventral to the central nervous system, it stiffens the body and acts as support during locomotion. Other characteristics shared by chordates include the following (from Hickman and Roberts, 1994):