Word: notochord
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Princeton University, Geologist B. F. Howell announced that a tiny fossil fishplate (scale) which he had picked the previous summer out of Cambrian strata in Franklin County, Vt., had been identified as belonging to a primitive fish, the earliest known creature to possess a notochord (rudimentary spine), which swam in the days of trilobites and brachiopods as the then (over 50 million years ago) highest form of animal life. Fellow scientists named the scale in honor of its discoverer "Howell's dawn fish," marking the dawn of vertebrate life...
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