Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Agnathan
/ˈæɡnəθən/noun
A jawless vertebrate, a group now reduced to the lampreys and hagfish.
The Greek roots
ἀ-
a-
not, without
γνάθος
gnáthos
jaw
Literally: “jawless”
The story of the word
Jawlessness is the older condition, not a defect: the first vertebrates had no jaws at all, and the ones that did came later, apparently by rebuilding a front pair of gill arches. Two lineages of agnathans survive, both of them slippery and unloved, against tens of thousands of jawed fish species. γνάθος also gives prognathous, jutting-jawed, a favourite word of nineteenth-century anthropometry.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific Latin → English
Same family
prognathousgnathostomechaetognath
In a sentence
The lamprey clamped to the salmon's flank is an agnathan doing what agnathans do.