We dropped down to a sandy bottom on our second dive to discover a huge aggregation of sand dollars. This species orientates itself with anterior end buried to expose its surfaces for feeding. Besides the many hundreds standing on end in each ripple of sand, what was most surprising were their beautiful shades of pink, purple and tan. This first photo shows the top side of the larger Dendraster excentricus and the bottom, or oral side of the smaller pink one. The larger was around 2.5 inches (60 mm).