Strange, spiky “shell” fossils with high levels of hydroxyapatite in their bone structure that confused paleontologists when they were first found. Eventually, a fossil impression of a jawless fish was found with conodonts in its mouth, revealing that conodonts were the first teeth.
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Conodont Term Timeline in Your Inner Fish
The timeline below shows where the term Conodont appears in Your Inner Fish. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4: Teeth Everywhere
The most common fossils from the ancient oceans are conodonts, first discovered in the 1830s by Russian biologist Christian Pander. Conodonts are small, shelly organisms...
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Part of the struggle in identifying conodonts as teeth was that the teeth were the only hard part of these ancient jawless...
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