It’s an honor to have something or someone named after you. Dr. David Pawson, Senior Research Scientist and Curator of Echinoderms at NMNH, has several genera and species, living and fossil, named after him. He says this little sea star, Pawsonaster parvus, is by far the prettiest! It is a small pentagonal species, little more than an inch across (hence the species name parvus, from Latin for "small"), orange on top and whitish underneath. It lives in depths of 30-600 meters, and it is known to live from the coast of North Carolina, through the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, to Uruguay in South America. This specimen was collected by the DROP team off Curaçao.