Last night (5th June) I watched Catalyst on the ABC. There was an excellent piece on John Long's wonderful discovery of embryonic development of Devonian Placoderms. These are a fossil fish group, long extinct, that have been shown to have embryos complete with umbilical cords. The fossil is Materpiscis (‘mother-fish’ in Latin) attenboroughi and Sir David is understandably very pleased with this honour. This fabulous discovery is part of the Gogo deposit in the Kimberly and was recently published in Nature. If you want to read more I highly recommend John's book Swimming in stone: the amazing Gogo fossils of the Kimberley. Fremantle: 2006.
Andrew Isles
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
"Actually, Andrew, John et al. have shown that some ptyctodonts had viviparity. We have known for 40 years that these placoderms had
claspers, thanks to the work of Roger Miles and others in Europe. We cannot yet suppose that the rest of the many different groups of placoderms had internal fertilisation and viviparity although we do have evidence for this in other Palaeozoic cartilagenous fishes.
We do have evidence of much older baby placoderms. For instance, Dr
Carole Burrow (Queensland)published on tiny placoderm eyeball
protective plates from the Lower Devonian.
Sue (paleodeadfish)"
Dr Susan Turner ~ Geoscience Consultant Publisher, Ichthyolith Issues
Post a Comment