Placodermi - History of Study

History of Study

The earliest studies of placoderms were published by Louis Agassiz, in his five volumes on fossil fishes, 1833–1843. In those days, the placoderms were thought to be shelled jawless fish akin to ostracoderms. Some naturalists even suggested that they were shelled invertebrates, or even turtle-like vertebrates. The work of Dr. Erik Stensiö, at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, from the late 1920s established the details of placoderm anatomy, and identified them as true jawed fishes related to sharks. He took fossil specimens with well-preserved skulls, and ground them away, one tenth of a millimeter at a time. Between each grinding, he made an imprint in wax. Once the specimens had been completely ground away (and so completely destroyed), he made enlarged, three dimensional models of the skulls in order to examine the anatomical details more thoroughly. Many other placoderm specialists suspected that Stensiö was trying to shoehorn placoderms into a relationship with sharks, but with more fossil specimens found, the theory of placoderms being the sister-group of chondrichthyians became accepted as fact. However, with the discovery and examination of the exquisitely preserved Gogo reef placoderm fossils, it became apparent that the placoderms shared anatomical features not only with chondrichthyians, but with other gnathostome groups, as well. For example, Gogo placoderms show separate bone for the nasal capsules which are incorporated into the braincase of both sharks and bony fish. Because of these new insights provided by the Gogo Reef specimens, coupled with the fact that placoderms also share anatomical features only with the jawless osteostracans, the theory that placoderms are the sister group of chondrichthyians has been replaced in favor of the theory that placoderms are a group of stem gnathostomes, in other words, they are the sister group of all other known gnathostomes.