Abstract
IN the course of my work upon the morphology of the Verte-brata, it has occurred to me to ascertain how far the generally accepted account of the structure of the teeth in Cyclostomata exhausts the facts at our disposal. The inquiry is one of extreme interest in relation to the disputed affinities of this group with the other fishes. It is well known that Balfour regarded the Myxinoids as the survivors of a very primitive group which had never possessed true jaws. Dohrn, on the other hand, while holding that these fishes retain very many primitive characters, has always asserted their degenerate nature as a canon of his doctrine of the ancestry of Vertebrates. He has endeavoured to produce evidence of this in several of his “Studien,” but so far as I am aware, the secondary character of the sucking mouth of the group has never yet been fully proved.
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BEARD, J. The Teeth of the Myxinoid Fishes . Nature 37, 499 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/037499a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/037499a0