Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The bishop-fish, a piscine humanoid reported in Poland in the 16th century. Aquatic humanoids appear in legend and fiction. [1] " Water-dwelling people with fully human, fish-tailed or other compound physiques feature in the mythologies and folklore of maritime, lacustrine and riverine societies across the planet."
The parietal eye of amphibians and reptiles appears relatively far forward in the skull; thus it may be surprising that the human pineal gland appears far away from this position, tucked away between the corpus callosum and cerebellum. Also the parietal bones, in humans, make up a portion of the rear of the skull, far from the eyes.
The eyes of most labyrinthodonts were situated at the top of the skull, offering good vision upwards, but very little lateral vision. The parietal eye was prominent, although there is uncertainty as to whether it was a true image producing organ or one that could only register light and dark, like that of the modern tuatara .
The largest living amphibian is the 1.8 m (5 ft 11 in) Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus) [41] but this is a great deal smaller than the largest amphibian that ever existed—the extinct 9 m (30 ft) Prionosuchus, a crocodile-like temnospondyl dating to 270 million years ago from the middle Permian of Brazil. [42]
Caecilians have small or absent eyes, with only a single known class of photoreceptors, and their vision is limited to dark-light perception. [17] [18] Unlike other modern amphibians (frogs and salamanders) the skull is compact and solid, with few large openings between plate-like cranial bones. The snout is pointed and bullet-shaped, used to ...
The human eye, showing the iris and pupil. In 1802, philosopher William Paley called it a miracle of "design."In 1859, Charles Darwin himself wrote in his Origin of Species, that the evolution of the eye by natural selection seemed at first glance "absurd in the highest possible degree". [3]
Cephalopods, as active marine predators, possess sensory organs specialized for use in aquatic conditions. [1] They have a camera-type eye which consists of an iris, a circular lens, vitreous cavity (eye gel), pigment cells, and photoreceptor cells that translate light from the light-sensitive retina into nerve signals which travel along the optic nerve to the brain. [2]
Diplocaulus (meaning "double stalk") is an extinct genus of lepospondyl amphibians which lived from the Late Carboniferous to the Late Permian of North America and Africa. Diplocaulus is by far the largest and best-known of the lepospondyls, characterized by a distinctive boomerang-shaped skull.