 There is good evidence that phoronids created trace fossils found in the Silurian, Devonian, Permian, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and possibly in the Ordovician and Triassic.Phoronids, brachiopods and bryozoans (ectoprocts) have collectively been called lophophorates, because all use lophophores to feed.From about the 1940s to the 1990s, family trees based on embryological and morphological features placed lophophorates among or as a sister group to the deuterostomes, a super-phylum which includes chordates and echinoderms.