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Palaeontology

Modern look for ancient lamprey

Nature volume 443, pages 921–923 (2006)Cite this article

It was once thought that lampreys evolved from armoured jawless vertebrates. But a recently discovered lamprey fossil dates from the twilight age of their supposed ancestors, and looks surprisingly modern.

Until the late twentieth century, cyclostomes were assumed to be 'degenerate' descendants of armoured jawless vertebrates — known informally as ostracoderms — that lived from the Ordovician period to the Devonian period, 490 million to 358 million years (Myr) ago (Fig. 1). Hagfishes and lampreys were thought to share a common ancestor that derived from certain ostracoderms — either osteostracans or anaspids2 (Fig. 1). The evolutionary divergence of the two cyclostome groups from each other was regarded as relatively recent, possibly occurring during the Mesozoic period 251–65 Myr ago. So the subsequent discovery of 300–330-Myr-old fossil lampreys and hagfishes from the Carboniferous period came as a surprise3. These fishes are exceptionally preserved as soft-tissue imprints and are almost identical to their modern successors. Nevertheless, there remained a gap of at least 35 Myr between these early cyclostomes and their previously supposed ancestors from the Devonian period, during which time they could have evolved by losing their mineralized skeleton.

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Figure 1: Vertebrate tree.

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  1. Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, UMR 5143, CNRS, 8 Rue Buffon, Paris, 75005, France

    Philippe Janvier

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Janvier, P. Modern look for ancient lamprey. Nature 443, 921–923 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/443921a

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