The family Brisingidae is defined by lacking bare interradial plates on the disk, and having arms constricted at their base whose abactinal plates form costae, and includes the genus Midgardia Downey, 1972 ( Downey, 1986 Zhang, Wang, Zhou, & Zhang, 2019). They were initially considered as one family, but after comparison of all the genera from the Atlantic waters, two well-defined families were designated: Brisingidae Sars, 1875 and Freyellidae Downey, 1986 ( Downey, 1986 Clark & Mah, 2001 Gale et al., 2014). The species of Brisingida Fisher, 1928 have a nearly global distribution but have remained poorly understood due to their deep bathymetric distributions and fragile skeletons. They also resemble crinoids when they raise their long, spined arms into the water column for suspension feeding ( Clark & Downey, 1992 Mah & Blake, 2012 Gale, Mah, Hamel & Mercier, 2014). Brisingids are deep-sea asteroids that have a body shape similar to ophiuroids due to their small, circular disk, which is clearly differentiated from their six to twenty, long and slender arms.
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