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Etymology: Vertebrates

Vertebrates are animals that have backbones or spinal columns. They make up around 4% of all animal species and include fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Key characteristics of vertebrates include their vertebral columns, craniums, paired appendages, and a central nervous system with a brain. The earliest vertebrates evolved around 525 million years ago during the Cambrian period and included some of the first animals with jaws. Vertebrates later diversified to include the first land-dwelling tetrapods like amphibians.

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49 views

Etymology: Vertebrates

Vertebrates are animals that have backbones or spinal columns. They make up around 4% of all animal species and include fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Key characteristics of vertebrates include their vertebral columns, craniums, paired appendages, and a central nervous system with a brain. The earliest vertebrates evolved around 525 million years ago during the Cambrian period and included some of the first animals with jaws. Vertebrates later diversified to include the first land-dwelling tetrapods like amphibians.

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aditya singh
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Vertebrates /vrtbrts/ comprise any species of animals within the subphylum Vertebrata // (chordates with backbones).

Vertebrates represent the overwhelming majority of


the phylum Chordata, with currently about 64,000 species described.[3] Vertebrates include
thejawless fish and the jawed vertebrates, which includes the cartilaginous fish (sharks and rays)
and the bony fish. A bony fish clade known as the lobe-finned fishes is included with tetrapods,
which are further divided into amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds. Extantvertebrates range in
size from the frog species Paedophryne amauensis, at as little as 7.7 mm (0.30 in), to the blue
whale, at up to 33 m (108 ft). Vertebrates make up about 4% of all described animal species; the
rest are invertebrates, which lack vertebral columns.
The vertebrates traditionally include the hagfish, which do not have proper vertebrae, though their
closest living relatives, the lampreys, do.[4] Hagfish do, however, possess a cranium. For this reason,
the vertebrate subphylum is sometimes referred to as "Craniata" when discussing morphology.
Molecular analysis since 1992 has suggested that the hagfish are most closely related to
lampreys,[5] and so also are vertebrates in a monophyletic sense. Others consider them a sister
group of vertebrates in the common taxon of craniata.[6]
Contents
[hide]

1Etymology
2Anatomy and morphology
o 2.1Vertebral column
o 2.2Gills
o 2.3Central nervous system
3Evolutionary history
o 3.1First vertebrates
o 3.2From fish to amphibians
o 3.3Mesozoic vertebrates
o 3.4After the Mesozoic
4Classification
o 4.1Traditional classification
o 4.2Phylogenetic relationships
5Number of extant species
6See also
7References
8Bibliography
9External links

Etymology[edit]
The word vertebrate derives from the Latin word vertebratus (Pliny), meaning joint of the spine.[7] It is
closely related to the word vertebra, which refers to any of the bones or segments of the spinal
column.[8]

Anatomy and morphology[edit]


See also: Vertebrate anatomy
All vertebrates are built along the basic chordate body plan: a stiff rod running through the length of
the animal (vertebral column ornotochord),[9] with a hollow tube of nervous tissue (the spinal cord)
above it and the gastrointestinal tract below. In all vertebrates, the mouth is found at, or right below,
the anterior end of the animal, while the anus opens to the exterior before the end of the body. The
remaining part of the body continuing after of the anus forms a tail with vertebrae and spinal cord,
but no gut.[10]

Vertebral column[edit]
The defining characteristic of a vertebrate is the vertebral column, in which the notochord (a stiff rod
of uniform composition) found in all chordates has been replaced by a segmented series of stiffer
elements (vertebrae) separated by mobile joints (intervertebral discs, derived embryonically and
evolutionarily from the notochord). However, a few vertebrates have secondarily lost this anatomy,
retaining the notochord into adulthood, such as the sturgeon[11] and the Latimeria. Jawed
vertebrates are typified by paired appendages (fins or legs, which may be secondarily lost), but this
is not part of the definition of vertebrates as a whole.

Fossilized skeleton of Diplodocus carnegii, showing an extreme example of the backbone that characterizes
the vertebrates.

Gills[edit]

Gill arches bearing gills in a pike

All basal vertebrates breathe with gills. The gills are carried right behind the head, bordering the
posterior margins of a series of openings from the esophagus to the exterior. Each gill is supported
by a cartilagenous or bony gill arch.[12] The bony fish have three pairs of arches,cartilaginous
fish have five to seven pairs, while the primitive jawless fish have seven. The vertebrate ancestor no
doubt had more arches, as some of their chordate relatives have more than 50 pairs of gills.[10]
In amphibians and some primitive bony fishes, the larvae bear external gills, branching off from the
gill arches.[13] These are reduced in adulthood, their function taken over by the gills proper in fishes
and by lungs in most amphibians. Some amphibians retain the external larval gills in adulthood, the
complex internal gill system as seen in fish apparently being irrevocably lost very early in the
evolution oftetrapods.[14]
While the higher vertebrates do not have gills, the gill arches form during fetal development, and lay
the basis of essential structures such as jaws, the thyroid gland, the larynx,
the columella (corresponding to the stapes in mammals) and in mammals the malleus and incus.[10]

Central nervous system[edit]


The central nervous system of vertebrates is based on a hollow nerve cord running along the length
of the animal. Of particular importance and unique to vertebrates is the presence of neural
crest cells. These are progenitors of stem cells, and critical to coordinating the functions of cellular
components.[15] Neural crest cells migrate through the body from the nerve cord during development,
and initiate the formation of neural ganglia and structures such as the jaws and skull.[16][17][18]
The vertebrates are the only chordate group to exhibit cephalisation, the concentration
of brain functions in the head. A slight swelling of the anterior end of the nerve cord is found in
the lancelet, though it lacks the eyes and other complex sense organs comparable to those of
vertebrates. Other chordates do not show any trends towards cephalisation.[10]

A peripheral nervous system branches out from the nerve cord to innervate the various systems.
The front end of the nerve tube is expanded by a thickening of the walls and expansion of the central
canal of spinal cord into three primary brain vesicles:
The prosencephalon (forebrain), mesencephalon (midbrain) and rhombencephalon (hindbrain),
further differentiated in the various vertebrate groups.[19] Two laterally placed eyes form around
outgrowths from the midbrain, except in hagfish, though this may be a secondary loss.[20][21] The
forebrain is well developed and subdivided in most tetrapods, while the midbrain dominate in
many fish and some salamanders. Vesicles of the forebrain are usually paired, giving rise to
hemispheres like the cerebral hemispheres in mammals.[19]
The resulting anatomy of the central nervous system, with a single hollow nerve cord topped by a
series of (often paired) vesicles, is unique to vertebrates. All invertebrates with well-developed
brains, such as insects, spiders and squids, have a ventral rather than dorsal system of ganglions,
with a split brain stem running on each side of the mouth or gut.[10]

Evolutionary history[edit]
See also: Evolution of fish and Evolution of tetrapods

First vertebrates[edit]

The early vertebrate Haikouichthys

Vertebrates originated about 525 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion, which saw the
rise in organism diversity. The earliest known vertebrate is believed to be
the Myllokunmingia.[1] Another early vertebrate is Haikouichthys ercaicunensis. Unlike the other
fauna that dominated the Cambrian, these groups had the basic vertebrate body plan: a notochord,
rudimentary vertebrae, and a well-defined head and tail.[22] All of these early vertebrates
lacked jaws in the common sense and relied on filter feeding close to the seabed.[23] A vertebrate
group of uncertain phylogeny, small-eel-like conodonts, are known from microfossils of their paired
tooth segments from the late Cambrian to the end of the Triassic.[24]

From fish to amphibians[edit]

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