Edited by oilshale
- 1
Report Fossil
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By oilshale (edited)
"Gunn's Ancient Vertebrae"
Kingdom: Animalia
Eon: Phanerozoic
Era: Paleozoic
Period: Devonian
Sub Period: None
Epoch: Middle
International Age: Eifelian - Givetian
Upper Caithness Flagstone Group
Stromness Flagstone Formation
Achanarras Limestone Member
Collector: T. Bastelberger
Date Collected: 06/01/1978
Acquired by: Field Collection
Length: 2 cm
Achanarras Quarry
Caithness County
Scotland
United Kingdom
The little fish, Palaeospondylus gunni, from the Middle Devonian of Achanarras, Caithness, is perhaps the most widely known of all problematical fossils. Ever since it was first described by Traquair in 1890, it has attracted the attention of a very large number of workers. Nevertheless, its affinities have not yet been convincingly demonstrated. The phylogeny of this bizarre fossil has puzzled scientists since its discovery in 1890, and many taxonomies have been suggested. Traquair and the majority of writers have considered Palaeospondylus to be related to Cyclostomes. However, other workers proposed that Palaeospondylus was a larval lungfish, a larval tetrapod, an unarmored placoderm, an agnathan or a chimera. In 2016, Tatsuya Hirasawa, Yasuhiro Oisi and Shigeru Kuratani proposed that Palaeospondylus was a primitive hagfish.
This assignment was recently questionend by Z. Johanson et al.: X-ray tomography provided new data and morphological characters demonstrating that Palaeospondylus is a jawed vertebrate.
Line drawing:
References:
J. A. Moy-Thomas (1940): The Devonian Fish Palaeospondylus gunni Traquair. Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 1940, Volume 230, issue 573.
Tatsuya Hirasawa, Yasuhiro Oisi and Shigeru Kuratani (2016): Palaeospondylus as a primitive hagfish. Zoological Letters 2016, 2:20.
Volume 16: Fossil Fishes of Great Britain Chapter 6: Mid-Devonian fossil fishes sites of Scotland. Site: ACHANARRAS QUARRY (GCR ID: 351)
Johanson Z, Smith M,Sanchez S, Senden T, Trinajstic K, Pfaff C. 2017 Questioning hagfish affinities of the enigmatic Devonian vertebrate Palaeospondylus. R. Soc. open sci. 4: 170214. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170214.
Achanarras Quarry
Edited by oilshale
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