Dr. Yara Haridi

Yeah.

They did really well for themselves.

Not all of them have odontodes, but these little algae-eating ones do.

And they have them all over their bodies, all over their fins, all over their cheeks.

And they ram each other with them.

They also sense their environment all the time because they're bottom dwellers, right?

So they're always feeling the bottom.

And they're tasting with taste buds in between their odontodes.

They taste their environment.

No.

Have you ever wondered when you like, if you put a little bit of food somewhere in your aquarium, even if it's far from your fish, they'll know where to get it.

That's because they're constantly kind of tasting their environment.

And so what happened when you were writing up this paper?

So it was like a bunch of different parts, right?

We made a arthropod library where we did comparative stuff.

We found out that they were since silly.

Then we did a bunch of stuff on sharks and catfish to find out the odontodes were innervated and then tied it all back to the ordovician vertebrates.

So this paper, we basically said the late Cambrian supposed vertebrate is not a vertebrate.

So we kicked that out, which meant that now our true earliest mineralizing vertebrates are middle Ordovician for 150 or so million years ago.

And we finally have a little bit of proof that the external odontodes were not only for protection,