Chinese Armored Fish, a prehistoric fish, showed that jaws originated from placoderms.
Placoderms are fishes that lived hundred million year ago. They existed even before the dinosaurs, Science News explained.
They explained the Armored Fish was one of them they have unusual jaws that look like metal cutters. They have jaw bones similar to blades that slices together called gnathal plates.
Most scientists believed that the gnathal plates originated from early bony fishes. Per Ahlberg, one of the researchers, said that placoderms' jaws independently evolved and that the human jaws have a different origin.
John Maisey from the American Museum of Natural History explained that with their findings negated this idea and that the armored fish might be an early ancestor of humans. This revolutionizes the evolution of vertebrates.
Researchers don't want to jump to any conclusions from just a single animal. However, these findings don't erase the fact that this can explain human's evolution history.
Science Daily reported that before researchers thought that placoderms and bony fishes are distant relatives. However, since these findings they were proven wrong.
The Armored Fish named Qilinyu rostrata is a 423 million years old fossil found in Yunan, China. It has a placoderm skeleton but has no dentary, maxilla and premaxilla.
Qilinyu was studied by palaeontologists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleonthropoogy and Uppsala University. Through Qilinyu, researchers found out that placoderms and bony fishes are closely related.
They explained that the gnathal plates of the prehistoric fish shows is positioned similarly to the coronoid bones of a bony fish. They stressed that humans have jaws with dentary, maxilla and premaxilla is because our jaw was re-modelled version of the placoderms' gnathal plates.
The researchers agreed that this is substantial in the human anatomy. This allowed them to look at the connection of placoderms and humans.
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