Scales teeth

Source: TW

While studying the anatomy of a shark in my youth, it became a pratyakSha to me how teeth and their scales had a common origin. This study suggests that the teeth have their ultimate origin in innervated sensory structures on skin – the sensory exoskeleton – and are comparable to those found in crustaceans and aglaspidid arthropods that might be related to trilobites. We suspect that while there is some structural convergence between these “skin-teeth” of arthropods and chordates, there was an ancestral sensilla in their common ancestor whose development was dependent on a tumor necrosis factor like protein Ectodysplasin.

Source: TW