Vertebrae

[positron]

Fish have a lot of vertebrae, i guess they're the only bones they have, but have they got more than any other animal?

[ecoli]

http://www.infovisual.info/02/034_en.html

 

Fish have a lots of bones.

[positron]

i was wondering.........are there any other species with more vertebrae than a fish?

[lucaspa]

It looks like several species of snakes do:

"A snake’s skeleton is lightweight and highly flexible. Like other reptiles, as well as fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals, snakes are vertebrates—that is, they have a backbone made of small, interconnecting bones called vertebrae. Snakes have an especially large number of vertebrae—all snakes have at least 100 vertebrae, and some species have more than 400. By comparison, humans have just 32 vertebrae. " http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761578341/Snake_(reptile).html

[geoguy]

Fish have a lot of vertebrae, i guess they're the only bones they have, but have they got more than any other animal?

 

I just retrned from a couple days in the Cretaceous deposits of the our nearby badlands. Some of the more common fossils we find are the vertebrae of various dinos and other reptiles. The hadrosaur and ceratopsian caudal tail vertebrae are often found in articulated sequence....up to 35 or so in the tail. Depending on the species these tail vertebrae start off the size of a softball and reduce down to the the size of a thimble at the tip of the tail.

 

Below is a photo of a hadrosaur tail section in my garden. Each of the bumps is an individual tail vertebra.

[CDarwin]

Fish have a lot of vertebrae, i guess they're the only bones they have, but have they got more than any other animal?

 

For one thing fish have more bones that just the vertebrae, but as for the number, it seems to be ridiculously variable, depending largely on the length.

 

From Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates 7 ed. by George C. Kent:

"Fish vertebrae are highly diverse, as might be expected in view of the enormous number of species that evolved- greater than in any other class of vertebrates- and the opportunity for subsequent genetic mutations during the lengthy Paleozoic era" (p. 199).

[carol]

i have a copy of that book too. anyway, the number of vertebrae is very variable. its like asking how many caudal vertebrae does a cat have. it was asked once in our Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates class. one of my classmates answered 20. and the whole class laughed.