Chordata

Chordata is the phylum of animals that includes humans, and as a result, it tends to receive a disproportionate amount of attention compared to the others. There are over 81,000 living species of chordates, with over 95% of them being vertebrates.Chordates, EOL The earliest known chordate fossils are around 530 million years old and were formed during the Cambrian explosion, although the phylum is likely to have originated earlier.Growing A Backbone: Chordates, The Institution for Scientific Advancement As chordates, or more specifically vertebrates, are the most abundant land animals besides arthropods, they were the focus of most of the early attempts at taxonomy. Paleontological and genetic evidence would prove these models to be wildly inaccurate, but many misconceptions fueled by them remain.
==Characteristics==
There are five or shared traits, that all chordates share and are believed to have come from their last common ancestor.Evolution and development of the chordates: collagen and pharyngeal cartilage, Amanda L. Rychel et al., Mol Biol Evol. 2006 Mar;23(3):541-9. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msj055. Epub 2005 Nov 9. PMID: 16280542. Lancelets have all of these traits throughout their lives, while for other chordates, some of these traits may only appear in the embryo stage. These traits are for the most part exclusive to chordates, although hemichordates have analogues to some of these.
===Notochord===
The trait that gave the phylum its name, the notochord is a semi-flexible rod across the length of chordates. Lancelets keep these throughout their entire lives, and rely on muscles to move the notochord. Tunicates have a notochord only in their larval stage, while in vertebrates the notochord is only present in embryos and gets supplanted by the vertebral column in development.Chordata: More on Morphology, University of California Museum of Paleontology The notochord is a source of signals to the rest of the body and is important to skeletal development in vertebrates.Structure and function of the notochord: an essential organ for chordate development, Derek L. Stemple, Development 2005 Jun;132(11):2503-12. doi: 10.1242/dev.01812. PMID: 15890825
===Dorsal nerve cord===
Located on the upper side of the notochord, the hollow dorsal nerve cord develops into the spine and brain of most chordates.Echinoderms and Chordates, Introductory Biology: Evolutionary and Ecological Perspectives This is unique to chordates, as other animal phyla have a ventral nerve cord in the center of the body,The Ventral Nerve Cord, unacademy although hemichordates have both a dorsal and ventral nerve cord.Brains of Primitive Chordates, J.C. Glover and B. Fritzsch, Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, Academic Press, 2009, Pages 439-448, ISBN 9780080450469
===Pharyngeal gill arches or slits===
Like many other animals, chordates have a but what makes chordates (and hemichordates)Genomic and Evolutionary Insights into Chordate Origins, Shawn M. Luttrell and Billie J. Swalla, Principles of Developmental Genetics (Second Edition), Academic Press, 2015, Pages 115-128, ISBN 9780124059450 unique is that they have slits in their pharynx. Lancelets and fish use their pharynx to take in oxygen from the water, while in humans these slits typically close in adults (if not, it requires surgery) but they help with the organization of blood vessels, bones, and glands in the upper body.Chordates, Orange County Community College
===Post-anal tail===
All chordates have a tail that extends past the anus, giving more space for the notochord and dorsal nerve cord. Tails also help for locomotion for marine chordates and balance for terrestrial ones.Chordates, OpenStaxCollege In certain tetrapods such as humans, the tail is vestigial.Most humans don’t have tails. So why do we have the bones for it?, Molly Glick, Popular Science 7 February 2022
===Endostyle/thyroid===
All chordates have one of these glands, with lancelets, tunicates, and lamprey larvae having endostyles and all other extant chordates having thyroids.Thyroid and endostyle development in cyclostomes provides new insights into the evolutionary history of vertebrates, Wataru Tagaki et al., BMC Biology 20, 76 (2022) Both of these glands are responsible for absorbing iodine.Overlapping expression of amphioxus homologs of the thyroid transcription factor-1 gene and thyroid peroxidase gene in the endostyle: insight into evolution of the thyroid gland, M. Ogasawara, Dev Genes Evol. 2000 May;210(5):231-42. doi: 10.1007/s004270050309. PMID: 11180827.
==Groups==
Chordates, like hemichordates and echinoderms, are which means that their develops into an anus, as opposed to a mouth as with such as arthropods, molluscs, and annelids. Chordates later split into three subphyla, cephalochordata, tunicata, and vertebrata. Cephalochordates split from the others first, so tunicates and vertebrates share a clade, which are defined by their more advanced olfactory system (a.k.a. their sense of smell). Hemichordates, which include were once considered to be a subphylum of chordates, as they have some analogous features, such as gill slits, a dorsal nerve chord, and a that is similar to a notochord. However, as DNA evidence has shown them to more closely related to echinoderms (sea stars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, sea lilies, etc.), they are now placed in their own phylum.Introduction to the Hemichordata, University of California Museum of Paleontology
===Cephalochordata===
 also known as lancelets or amphioxi, are small fish-like filter-feeding invertebrates that are considered to be the most primative extant chordates, with a fossil record dating back to the There are around thirty known extant species of lancelets. They have no vertebrae and have poorly developed sense organs, but they have a muscular notochord and the other traits associated with chordates.Introduction to the Cephalochordata, University of California Museum of Paleonatology Lancelets reproduce by external reproduction, with planktonic larvae that eventuality develop into benthic adults that live in the sand.The Ontology of the Amphioxus Anatomy and Life Cycle (AMPHX), Stephanie Bertrand et al., Front. Cell Dev. Biol., 26 April 2021 Sec. Evolutionary Developmental Biology
Lancelets are eaten as food by several cultures, mainly in East Asia, and they supposedly taste like anchovies.Preliminary Nutritional Analysis of Lancelets, a Promising Seafood with Aquacultural Potential, Jennifer E. Frick and Edward E. Rupert, January 2001 Journal of Aquatic Food Product Technology 10(1):63-75 They are widely studied in order to gain insights into the evolutionary history of vertebrates, as they were once thought to be the closest invertebrate relative of vertebrates, although genetic analysis has revealed the below-mentioned tunicates to be more closely related instead.Decelerated genome evolution in modern vertebrates revealed by analysis of multiple lancelet genomes, Shengfeng Huang et al., Nat Commun. 2014 Dec 19; 5: 5896
===Tunicata===
Quite a bit more diverse than the lancelets with about 3,000 species, the are another group of mostly benthic marine filter-feeding invertebrates. The most well-known tunicates are the sea squirts, so named for their habit of "squirting" water when removed from the sea.Sea squirts, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Like lancelets, they are sometimes eaten by humans,We eat hoya sea squirts out of a can, enjoy a tasty regional delicacy from the comfort of home, Dale Roll, Sora News 12 March 2021 although many species of tunicates are poisonous, containing high levels of vanadium and sulfuric acid.Phylum Chordata, Exploring Our Fluid Earth Some other, less well-known tunicates include colonial (aka "sea pickles"), planktonic and the stalked which have a symbiotic relationship with sponges.Sea tulip, Australian Museum
At first glance, tunicates look nothing like other chordates, and it can be surprising to learn that these are the invertebrates that are most similar to humans. However, it makes more sense when you look at their larvae, which look similar to tadpoles. These larvae do not have mouths and thus cannot eat, however within a few days the tunicate will begin to metamorphose after the larvae attatches to a hard surface in most species. During the metamorphasis, the notochord merges with the rest of the body, and afterwards, with the exception of free-floating species, the tunicates become completely sessile. Some tunicates bud to produce colonies, while others live alone.Tunicates, Coral Digest
===Vertebrata===
The vertebrates, or animals with a backbone, are the largest group of chordates, with a fossil record dating back to the Cambrian Historically split into mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, this taxonomy was found to be wildly inaccurate for several reasons that we'll get to later. This subphylum contains the largest animals known to have existed,It looks like a giant manatee. And it may have been Earth’s largest animal ever., Dino Grandoni, Washington Post 2 August 2023 as well as the only animals known to have edited RationalWiki. As the first vertebrates were likely jawless fish (see below), this means that every vertebrate can be accurately called a fish.The absurdity of natural history – or, why humans are ‘fish’, Jack Ashby, The Conversation 29 November 2016
====Agnatha====
This is an infraphylum consisting of the and it is sister to which contains all other extant vertebrate species. Although they used to be a lot more diverse in the past, there are only two remaining extant groups: or hagfishes and or lampreys, both of the taxa Some extinct groups include the conodonts, the primative and the which were the most diverse group.
Modern jawless fishes have a skeleton made of cartilage and a third to help detect light, but they lack side fins or a stomach.Agnatha - Lamprey, Hagfish, PBS Lampreys lack gill openings and have their gills behind their mouth and eyes. They are parasites that use their tongue to put holes in a fish's skin so they can suck their prey's bodily fluids. They have become invasive in many places, with a single lamprey being capable of killing 40 pounds of fish per year.What is a sea lamprey?,National Ocean Service Hagfish, on the other hand, are slimy scavengers with four hearts that also occasionally prey on marine invertebrates, although their slow metabolism means they don't have to eat often. Being almost blind, they rely primarily on their senses of touch and smell, which is helped out by their sensing tentacles on their mouths. While hagfish have a partial cranium and a notochord, they don't actually have any vertebrae, meaning there was a debate as to whether these are vertebrates at all, although since hagfish were found to be closely related to lampreys, excluding them would make the group paraphyletic.Introduction to the Myxini Hagfishes, University of California Museum of Paleontology Their gills form lens-shaped pouches, which makes them different from those of lampreys or any other extant fish, which have The Gills of Hagfishes, Helmut Bartels, The Biology of Hagfishes 978-94-011-5834-3
====Chondrichthyes====
Also known as the "cartilaginous fishes" (although it would be more accurate to say "jawed cartilaginous fishes" since lampreys and hagfishes also have skeletons (or just a skull in the hagfishes' case) made of cartilage), this class includes two subclasses: which contains sharks, rays, skates, and sawfishes, and of which the only living representatives are the chimaeras or "ghost sharks". They likely descended from or "spiny sharks".The Evolution of Sharks: What Were Ancient Sharks Like?, Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover 1 April 2023 They first appeared in the Silurian, and many species that live today are remarkably similar to those that lived hundreds of millions of years ago.Cartilaginous Fish, Orange County Community College
Most of their skeletons are made of cartilage; the only part with calcium is their teeth, which tend to be by far the most common part to fossilize. Like the bony fish, chondrichthyes have paired fins, but unlike them, they lack meaning they must constantly be in motion.Chondrichthyes, Fernbank Science Center Additionally, all chondrichthyes are capable of or the ability to sense changes in electricity of their surroundings; only a handful of modern-day bony fish like can do the same.Electroreception in marine fishes: chondrichthyans, Kyle C. Newton et al., Journal of Fish Biology Volume 95 Issue 1 pages 135-154 6 June 2019
====Actinopterygii====
Under the superclass (bony fish) and sister to the below Sarcopterygii, the "ray-finned fishes" are the most diverse class of chordates, comprising a slight majority of vertebrate species.Introduction to the Actinopterygii, University of California Museum of Paleontology They are separated from other kinds of fish by their which are webs of fins supported by bony spines. Additionally, unlike jawless or cartilaginous fish, they have swim bladders, which provide buoyancy and allow the fish to stay in place in the water without using energy.Actinopterygii: Ray-Finned Fishes, NC.com 
There are two subclasses of ray-finned fish: and Cladistia contains the bichirs and reedfish, a group of fish that share some traits with the below lobe-finned fishes and can even live on land for short periods of time.A fish out of water — walks and morphs, Susan Millius, ScienceNews Explores 9 September 2014 Actinopteri can be further split into (sturgeons and paddlefish) and Sturgeons and paddlefish both have their skeletons made partially from cartilage, and their fins look more like those of sharks than other ray-finned fishes.Acipenseriformes - Paddlefish, Sturgeons, New Hampshire PBS Finally, Neopterygii can be split into gars and bowfins, and which contains sea horses, anglerfish, eels, ocean sunfish, and every other ray-finned fish you can think of. Gars and bowfins are long, tough, predatory freshwater fish that can inhabit oxygen-poor waters as they can breathe air through their gills.Gar!, Catalogue of Organisms Teleosts are separated from the other ray-finned fish by their movable allowing their jaws to protrude from their mouths.Teleostei, University of California Museum of Paleontology
====Sarcopterygii====
The lobe-finned fishes, as these are commonly called, are distinguished by their fleshy fins, which became limbs in tetrapods.Sarcopterygii - lobe-finned fishes, UCL While they were more diverse in the past, there are only two extant subclasses of lobe-finned fishes: which contains coelacanths, and which contains lungfish and tetrapods (see below). Coelacanths are living fossils that have several traits that are unique to them among living chordates, among them an oil-filled swim bladder and incompletely formed vertebrae.Coelacanth, Smithsonian Institute Lungfish are another ancient order of fish dating back to the Devonian that can breathe air using their modified swim bladders.Introduction to the Dipnoi, University of California Museum of Paleontology
=====Tetrapoda=====
Finally, the group including goats, dinosaurs, monkeys, and other iconic animals. This group was considered so important that half of the six groups of animals in the original Linnaen taxonomy were tetrapods!Linnaean Classification System (Scientific Names), Anne Marie Helmenstine, ThoughtCo. 30 July 2019 This group was classically divided into mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. However, this system was proven inaccurate for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there was still a lot of gray area with these categories; for instance, "mammal-like reptiles" like were grouped in with reptiles, despite being more closely related to mammals than any extant reptiles.Dimetrodon Is Not a Dinosaur: Using Tree Thinking to Understand the Ancient Relatives of Mammals and their Evolution, K.D. Angielczyk, Evo Edu Outreach 2, 257–271 (2009) Secondly, birds were found to be the direct descendants of dinosaurs, despite dinosaurs being grouped in with reptiles. Thirdly, the group "amphibians" is paraphyletic, as all tetrapods have ancestors that would classically be considered to be "amphibians". This meant that this system, while being intuitive to humans, did not reflect the realities of their evolutionary relation, so a new system had to be found.
Today, tetrapoda is split into two subgroups, and Batrachomorpha includes all modern amphibians as well as extinct ones that are more closely related to modern-day frogs than they are to snakes or humans. Reptiliomorpha is the opposite, containing all animals related more closely to snakes than to frogs, with all modern-day reptilomorphs being in Amniota is split into which contains mammals and their ancestors up to the synapsid-sauropsid split, and which contains all modern-day reptiles, including birds, as well as their ancestors up to the synapsid-sauropsid split.
==Evolutionary history==
===Development of notochord===
How chordates developed from earlier deuterostomes is still a topic of debate in biology, and our understanding of the topic has shifted quite a bit in the last couple of decades alone.New Approaches in Chordate and Vertebrate Evolution and Development, Juan Pascual-Anaya et al., Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology 10, 2022 10.3389/fcell.2022.917101 2296-634X When looking for how the first chordates may have evolved, it is useful to look at the chordates' closest relatives (hemichordates and echinoderms) and see what they have in common using morphological, chemical, and genetic data. By doing this, and looking back to the protostomes that they likely split from, it can be inferred that the notochord and dorsal nerve cord likely developed from the ventral nerve cord, while the deuterostome mouth that the three phyla share likely developed from amphistomy, or the division of blastopores in embryos, similarly to what happens with nematodes.Evolution of deuterostomy - and origin of the chordates, Claus Nielsen, Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2017 Feb;92(1):316-325 doi: 10.1111/brv.12229 Epub 2015 Oct 21 PMID: 26486096
===Development of vertebrae===
Chemical analysis suggests that the invertebrate to vertebrate transition was preceded by a whole gene duplication, which allowed the copies of the genes to take on many mutations without impeding the primary set of genes, allowing such a massive evolutionary leap.Evolutionary transition between invertebrates and vertebrates via methylation reprogramming in embryogenesis, Xiaocui Xu et al., National Science Review, Volume 6, Issue 5, September 2019, Pages 993–1003 Unlike the deuterostome-chordate transition, there are some known fossils that illustrate this transition well, such as Haikouichthys. The exact placement of Haikouichthys is still a little controversial, as some consider it to be the earliest known vertebrate while others consider it to be of a more broadly-defined clade like Nevertheless, the animal definitely has important vertebrate features like a skull and dorsal fin.Fossil Jawless Vertebrates, John Merck, University of Maryland
===Development of jaws===
During embryonic development of gnathostomes, the front pharyngeal arch develops into a jaw, while the rest of them develop into gills. This suggests that the jaw has its origin as a specialized gill.How did vertebrates first evolve jaws?, Cristy Lytal, Keck School of Medicine of USC 28 June 2022 Among the earliest known fish to have jaws are the now extinct placoderms (also known as "armoured fish"), although their jaws had bony plates rather than any true "teeth".Introduction to the Placodermi, University of California Museum of Paleontology
===Development of limbs===
The evolution of limbs is perhaps the most important milestone in tetrapod evolution, but before tetrapods could develop limbs, their ancestors needed to develop paired fins. There have been a few competing theories on how paired fins first developed, but recently discovered fossils of Tujiaaspis, a jawless fish in the taxa suggest that paired fins developed from an earlier fin on top of the animal folding over both sides of the fish and later splitting into two paired fins on opposite sides.Dead fish breathes new life into the evolutionary origin of fins and limbs, University of Bristol The fin-to-limb transition is perhaps best illustrated by Tiktaalik, a lobe-finned fish right in the middle of it, and an analysis of its skeleton shows that it already had muscles propping it up in its fins and asymetries between its two pairs of fins that allowed it to better be able to walk.How fish fins evolved just before the transition to land, Matt Wood, University of Chicago 2 January 2020
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Animals
Category:Evolution