Tetrapod anatomy: Backbone back-to-front in early animals

...especially if the paper is saying early tetrapods have their spinal chord in front.

Because every single tetrapod alive today (AFAIK) has a spine in back. Maybe there were some tetrapods with spine in front, but none of their ancestors seem to be alive today.

Interesting.

R&K

Commenting w/o reading full paper. Will read paper later.

I was pretty skeptical at first. Apparently the specimens they examined are rarer than I had imagined, and so have never been fully extracted from the matrix for fear of causing irreversible damage. New X-ray imaging allows the fossils to be imaged without removing the encasing matrix.



OTOH, not the first time something like this happened. I know at least one famous dinosaur skeleton was diplayed with its neck and tail reversed, so the skull was on the end of the tail (long time ago, couldn't happen again ...).

BTW, I believe the neck tail swap was on a sauropod, you know... Big, long necked plant eater, IIRC.

But I haven't seen any of these samples and don't know how they learn comparative anatomy. I'm guessing they can now judge lineage by spinal morphology.

...new tools bring new insight, new ideas, and better knowledge.

From the article:



As usual, I find a bit of journalistic hyperbole in the comment "Textbooks might have to be re-written". Future textbooks may note that for a long time the commonly accepted views reversed the direction of early tetrapod spine fossils, but later discoveries led to the current view, which has the following consequences ...., and led to the yet later discoveries of foo and bar and mumble.

Science doesn't need to rewrite it's past to cover up 'errors'. Science is a process whereby the misinterpretations caused by limited perceptions are discovered, corrected, and accepted. Rant off.