Well, not all vertebrates have straight backs, but all have backbones, or vertebral columns, that help support their bodies.
Amphioxus, the highest animals lacking vertebral columns, are dioecious.
I could visualize a huge can of codfish skulls, with striking enlarged intercalary bones; Spanish-mackerel vertebral columns, with articulating processes designed with a fine precision and economy; and the skull of my own red snapper, with a magnificent supraoccipital crest.
Focusing on marlin, Long studied the vertebral columns in recently deceased fish and observed the swimming patterns of live fish.
Why is it that all the organisms that have hair or vertebral columns resolved as monophyletic groups? 6.
At first, Long built robots that mimicked certain features of biological systems as a means of understanding the evolution of vertebral columns.
Funded by NSF, DARPA, and the Office of Naval Research, members of the lab are studying fish schooling behavior and the vertebral columns in sharks and bony fish.
Will robotic backbones become progressively stiffer in successive generations, thus corroborating the author's hypothesis that vertebral columns evolved from notochords under selection pressure for enhanced feeding?
