Question

2. Let’s say the Tully Monster is a vertebrate. What might that mean for our understanding of what early vertebrates looked like (for example, did ancestral vertebrates have a dual melanosome retinal pigment epithelium)?

Answer 1

The earliest vertebrates resembled hagfish and lived more than 500 million years ago. As other classes of fish appeared , they evovled traits such as a complete vertebral column , jaws, and a bony endoskeleton. Amphibians were the first tetrapod vertebrates as well the first tetrapod vertebrates as well as the first vertebrates to live on land

The earliest known vertebrates are thought to be the basal chordates Myllokunmingia and Haikouichthys, both coming from the lower Cambrian Chengjiang Maotianshan Shales. Jawed vertebrates appear in the Ordovician fossil record and become common in the devonian a period often called the age of fishes