Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Amphioxus
/ˌæmfiˈɒksəs/noun
The lancelet, a small burrowing sea animal shaped like a fish with everything inessential removed.
The Greek roots
ἀμφί
amphí
on both sides
ὀξύς
oxýs
sharp, pointed
Literally: “sharp at both ends”
The story of the word
It has a notochord, a nerve cord above it, gill slits and segmented muscle blocks, and no skull, no jaws, no paired eyes, which makes it the standard living stand-in for what an early chordate body might have been. Formally the genus is Branchiostoma, which has priority, but laboratories have gone on saying amphioxus for a century and a half. Marine biologists even have a song about it, sung to the tune of Tipperary.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
amphibianamphitheatreoxygenparoxysm
In a sentence
Amphioxus buries itself tail-first in clean sand and filters water through its gill slits.