Document Type

Research

Abstract

Prior to Darwin's time there had been speculations regarding the origin and the relationships of the various plant and animal groups. Some of these were ingenious and some of them hit close enough to post-Darwinian ideas to have led some biologists to over-value them. To most biologists of those days, however, such problems were unimportant. They seem to have taken the animal and plant groups for granted. Similarities and differences were used in classification, but to their authors such concepts as archetypes, etc. probably had no special philosophic importance. A vertebrate archetype was like an alphabet, a composite of the characters shown by different vertebrates, these characters being grouped, rearranged, and varied in different forms, but such community of characters had only a function of convenience.

Publication Date

1949

Journal Title

Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science

Volume

Issue

First Page

379

Last Page

384

Copyright

Language

File Format

application/pdf

Recommended Citation

Robertson, George M. (1949) "Some Contributions of Fossil Study to the Problem of Vertebrate Origin," Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science, 56(1), 379-384.
Available at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/pias/vol56/iss1/54

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Some Contributions of Fossil Study to the Problem of Vertebrate Origin

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