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Squatinactis
''Squatinactis'' is a genus of extinct Elasmobranchii, elasmobranch Chondrichthyes known from the Carboniferous aged Bear Gulch Limestone, Bear gulch limestone in Montana. This fish was discovered in 1974 by Richard Lund. The Holotype, type specimen, named CMNH 46133, consists of a Neurocranium, brain case, poorly preserved Mouth, jaws and gills, a pectoral fin, and a partial Vertebra, vertebral axis. This creatures most startling feature were its broad pectoral fins which resembled those of Stingrays and Angel sharks (Angelshark, ''Squatina''). The holotype specimen has about 15 Tooth, teeth in its jaw. This creature is named after the angel shark. Teeth found in Derbyshire, England have been tentatively identified as those belonging to ''S. caudispinatus.'' Description ''Squatinactis'' had a flattened body with a set of large pectoral fins. This fish was vaguely similar to today's Stingray, stingrays and angel sharks. The flins were oddly pointed forward, with a length of arou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bear Gulch Limestone
The Bear Gulch Limestone is a limestone-rich geological lens in central Montana, renowned for the quality of its late Mississippian-aged fossils. It is exposed over a number of outcrops northeast of the Big Snowy Mountains, and is often considered a component of the more widespread Heath Formation. The Bear Gulch Limestone reconstructs a diverse, though isolated, marine ecosystem which developed near the end of the Serpukhovian age. It is a lagerstätte, a particular type of rock unit with exceptional fossil preservation of both articulated skeletons and soft tissues. Bear Gulch fossils include a variety of fish, invertebrates, and algae occupying a number of different habitats within a preserved shallow bay. Fish include a high diversity of unusual Chondrichthyes, chondrichthyans (cartilaginous fish) and one of the oldest known lampreys, along with other vertebrates. Invertebrates include numerous fossils of crustaceans, worms, cephalopods, and Sponge, sea sponges, which are con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carboniferous
The Carboniferous ( ) is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic that spans 60 million years from the end of the Devonian Period million years ago ( Mya), to the beginning of the Permian Period, million years ago. The name ''Carboniferous'' means "coal-bearing", from the Latin '' carbō'' ("coal") and '' ferō'' ("bear, carry"), and refers to the many coal beds formed globally during that time. The first of the modern 'system' names, it was coined by geologists William Conybeare and William Phillips in 1822, based on a study of the British rock succession. The Carboniferous is often treated in North America as two geological periods, the earlier Mississippian and the later Pennsylvanian. Terrestrial animal life was well established by the Carboniferous Period. Tetrapods (four limbed vertebrates), which had originated from lobe-finned fish during the preceding Devonian, became pentadactylous in and diversified during the Carboniferous, including early amphibian line ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dracopristis
''Dracopristis'' is an extinct genus of ctenacanth (a group of shark-like elasmobranchs) that lived around 307 million years ago, during the Pennsylvanian sub-period of the Carboniferous period. The fish had 12 rows of short, squat teeth, and an array of spines on its dorsal fins. The main differentiation between ctenacanthiformes and true sharks is that ctenacanthiform mouths are larger but less flexible than the true sharks. The spines of the holotype fossil are about 0.57 meters long, and the whole body was around 2 meters (6 ft) long. Discovery and description Fossils of ''D. hoffmanorum'' were first discovered in 2013, when a graduate student unearthed the fish's remains from late Pennsylvanian age rocks of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The creature was formally named seven years later in a 2021 paper which described, named and classified it. The fish's fossils were found within the Tinajas member, which dates to the late Pennsylvanian. The holotype specimen, named ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pectoral Fin
Fins are distinctive anatomical features composed of bony spines or rays protruding from the body of a fish. They are covered with skin and joined together either in a webbed fashion, as seen in most bony fish, or similar to a flipper, as seen in sharks. Apart from the tail or caudal fin, fish fins have no direct connection with the spine and are supported only by muscles. Their principal function is to help the fish swim. Fins located in different places on the fish serve different purposes such as moving forward, turning, keeping an upright position or stopping. Most fish use fins when swimming, flying fish use pectoral fins for gliding, and frogfish use them for crawling. Fins can also be used for other purposes; male sharks and mosquitofish use a modified fin to deliver sperm, thresher sharks use their caudal fin to stun prey, reef stonefish have spines in their dorsal fins that inject venom, anglerfish use the first spine of their dorsal fin like a fishing rod ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elasmobranchii
Elasmobranchii () is a subclass of Chondrichthyes or cartilaginous fish, including sharks (superorder Selachii), rays, skates, and sawfish (superorder Batoidea). Members of this subclass are characterised by having five to seven pairs of gill clefts opening individually to the exterior, rigid dorsal fins and small placoid scales on the skin. The teeth are in several series; the upper jaw is not fused to the cranium, and the lower jaw is articulated with the upper. The details of this jaw anatomy vary between species, and help distinguish the different elasmobranch clades. The pelvic fins in males are modified to create claspers for the transfer of sperm. There is no swim bladder; instead, these fish maintain buoyancy with large livers rich in oil. The definition of the clade is unclear with respect to fossil chondrichthyans. It has been used by different authors as equivalent to Neoselachii (the clade including modern sharks and rays and their last common ancestor) or for al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chondrichthyes
Chondrichthyes (; ) is a class that contains the cartilaginous fishes that have skeletons primarily composed of cartilage. They can be contrasted with the Osteichthyes or ''bony fishes'', which have skeletons primarily composed of bone tissue. Chondrichthyes are jawed vertebrates with paired fins, paired nares, scales, and a heart with its chambers in series. Extant chondrichthyes range in size from the 10 cm (3.9 in) finless sleeper ray to the 10 m (32 ft) whale shark. The class is divided into two subclasses: Elasmobranchii (sharks, rays, skates, and sawfish) and Holocephali ( chimaeras, sometimes called ghost sharks, which are sometimes separated into their own class). Within the infraphylum Gnathostomata, cartilaginous fishes are distinct from all other jawed vertebrates. Anatomy Skeleton The skeleton is cartilaginous. The notochord is gradually replaced by a vertebral column during development, except in Holocephali, where the notochord stays intact. In some deepwat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pectoral Fins
Fins are distinctive anatomical features composed of bony spines or rays protruding from the body of a fish. They are covered with skin and joined together either in a webbed fashion, as seen in most bony fish, or similar to a flipper, as seen in sharks. Apart from the tail or caudal fin, fish fins have no direct connection with the spine and are supported only by muscles. Their principal function is to help the fish swim. Fins located in different places on the fish serve different purposes such as moving forward, turning, keeping an upright position or stopping. Most fish use fins when swimming, flying fish use pectoral fins for gliding, and frogfish use them for crawling. Fins can also be used for other purposes; male sharks and mosquitofish use a modified fin to deliver sperm, thresher sharks use their caudal fin to stun prey, reef stonefish have spines in their dorsal fins that inject venom, anglerfish use the first spine of their dorsal fin like a fishing rod to lu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cladodont
This is a typical Cladodont tooth, of a shark called ''Glikmanius''">Glikmanius.html" ;"title="shark called ''Glikmanius">shark called ''Glikmanius'' Cladodont (from Latin cladus, meaning branch and Greek Odon, meaning tooth) is the term for a common category of early Devonian shark known primarily for its "multi-cusped" tooth consisting of one long blade surrounded by many short, fork-like tines, designed to catch food that was swallowed whole, instead of being used to saw off chunks of meat like many modern sharks. The skinny teeth would puncture and grasp the prey, keeping it from wriggling free. Because the most common fossil evidence of cartilaginous fish is teeth, this term is also used for the fossilised teeth themselves. History The fossil tooth of '' Cladodus belifer'', which lived about 260,000,000 years ago in what would someday be Illinois. The roundness of the main tooth, and the small tines around it, show it to be a cladodont. The earliest known shark, ''Clado ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paleozoic
The Paleozoic (or Palaeozoic) Era is the earliest of three geologic eras of the Phanerozoic Eon. The name ''Paleozoic'' ( ;) was coined by the British geologist Adam Sedgwick in 1838 by combining the Greek words ''palaiós'' (, "old") and ''zōḗ'' (), "life", meaning "ancient life" ). It is the longest of the Phanerozoic eras, lasting from , and is subdivided into six geologic periods (from oldest to youngest): # Cambrian # Ordovician # Silurian # Devonian # Carboniferous # Permian The Paleozoic comes after the Neoproterozoic Era of the Proterozoic Eon and is followed by the Mesozoic Era. The Paleozoic was a time of dramatic geological, climatic, and evolutionary change. The Cambrian witnessed the most rapid and widespread diversification of life in Earth's history, known as the Cambrian explosion, in which most modern phyla first appeared. Arthropods, molluscs, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and synapsids all evolved during the Paleozoic. Life began in the ocean ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phylogenetic Tree
A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical or genetic characteristics. All life on Earth is part of a single phylogenetic tree, indicating common ancestry. In a ''rooted'' phylogenetic tree, each node with descendants represents the inferred most recent common ancestor of those descendants, and the edge lengths in some trees may be interpreted as time estimates. Each node is called a taxonomic unit. Internal nodes are generally called hypothetical taxonomic units, as they cannot be directly observed. Trees are useful in fields of biology such as bioinformatics, systematics, and phylogenetics. ''Unrooted'' trees illustrate only the relatedness of the leaf nodes and do not require the ancestral root to b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cladoselache
''Cladoselache'' is an extinct genus of shark-like chondrichthyan (cartilaginous fish) from the Late Devonian (Famennian) of North America. It was similar in body shape to modern lamnid sharks (such as mako sharks and the great white shark), but was not closely related to lamnids or to any other modern (selachian) shark. As an early chondrichthyan, it had yet to evolve traits of modern sharks such as accelerated tooth replacement, a loose jaw suspension, enameloid teeth, and possibly claspers. Some 20th century studies considered ''Cladoselache'' to be a basal (early-diverging) member of Elasmbobranchii, the fork of cartilaginous fish which leads to modern sharks and rays. More recent studies have identified distinctive traits of the chondrocranium (cartilaginous braincase), dorsal fin spines, and pectoral fin bases. These newly identified features support a close relationship to symmoriiforms, a small group of bizarre chondrichthyans such as the bristle-spined '' Stethacanthu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Serpukhovian
The Serpukhovian is in the ICS geologic timescale the uppermost stage or youngest age of the Mississippian, the lower subsystem of the Carboniferous. The Serpukhovian age lasted from Ma to Ma. It is preceded by the Visean and is followed by the Bashkirian. The Serpukhovian correlates with the lower part of the Namurian Stage of European stratigraphy and the middle and upper parts of the Chesterian Stage of North American stratigraphy. Name and definition The Serpukhovian Stage was proposed in 1890 by Russian stratigrapher Sergei Nikitin and was introduced in the official stratigraphy of European Russia in 1974. It was named after the city of Serpukhov, near Moscow. The ICS later used the upper Russian subdivisions of the Carboniferous in its international geologic time scale. The base of the Serpukhovian is informally defined by the first appearance of the conodont '' Lochriea ziegleri'', though the utility and systematic stability of this species is not yet certain. N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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