IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/nature/v443y2006i7114d10.1038_nature05150.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A lamprey from the Devonian period of South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Robert W. Gess

    (University of Witwatersrand)

  • Michael I. Coates

    (University of Chicago)

  • Bruce S. Rubidge

    (University of Witwatersrand)

Abstract

Out of the shadows Lampreys and hagfish are the only remaining jawless vertebrates and are commonly used as surrogate ancestors for comparative research on living jawed vertebrates. Until recently little was known of the evolutionary history of lampreys as the only known fossils were enigmatic examples from the Carboniferous period, around 300 million years ago. Then earlier this year Nature published a report of a fine specimen from the Cretaceous of China that looked very close to modern forms. This is now joined by a well preserved fossil from the Devonian of South Africa, which at about 360 million years old is the oldest known lamprey. It looks slightly different from modern lampreys, but is the same in essentials and differs from the various now-extinct armoured fishes with which it shared the Devonian world.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert W. Gess & Michael I. Coates & Bruce S. Rubidge, 2006. "A lamprey from the Devonian period of South Africa," Nature, Nature, vol. 443(7114), pages 981-984, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:443:y:2006:i:7114:d:10.1038_nature05150
    DOI: 10.1038/nature05150
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05150
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/nature05150?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Feixiang Wu & Philippe Janvier & Chi Zhang, 2023. "The rise of predation in Jurassic lampreys," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-12, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:443:y:2006:i:7114:d:10.1038_nature05150. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.