Catalog / class

Myxini

The Cretaceous hagfish Tethymyxine preserves barbel cartilages, a branchial apparatus behind the skull and chemical traces interpreted as slime glands. These fossil features document similarities to living hagfish, not directly observed slime production or a universal description of every Myxini species. This navigation entry is not a phylogeny or a complete taxon dossier.

Represented range100.5–Present Ma

Content packageearly-fishes

PBDBtxn:401644

Evidence boundary

Automated checks cover structure, identifiers, translations and links only; maintainer and external expert review are not complete.

Claim ledger

morphology · medium

claim:taxon:myxini:tethymyxine-soft-anatomy

fossil-range · medium

The complete body fossil Tethymyxine tapirostrum holotype BHI 6445 from the Cenomanian Hâdjoula Lagerstätte of Lebanon, displayed as 100.5–93.9 Ma, was recovered within crown Myxini; this specimen supports a crown-hagfish fossil bound but not a global FAD, and the older stem hagfish Myxinikela is excluded from the crown range.

claim:taxon:myxini:crown-record

Known limits

A missing branch or fossil occurrence does not imply biological absence. Internal nodes are not calibrated divergence estimates.

References

Hagfish from the Cretaceous Tethys Sea and a reconciliation of the morphological–molecular conflict in early vertebrate phylogenyMiyashita, T.; Coates, M.I.; Farrar, R.; Larson, P.; Manning, P.L.; Wogelius, R.A.; Edwards, N.P.; Anné, J.; Bergmann, U.; Palmer, A.R.; Currie, P.J. · 2019 · DOI 10.1073/pnas.1814794116
Open Tree of Life web servicesOpenTreeOfLife Project
The Paleobiology Database application programming interfacePeters, S.E.; McClennen, M. · 2016 · DOI 10.1017/pab.2015.39
Denormalized occurrence and taxon tables of the Paleobiology DatabaseThe Paleobiology Database Community; Kocsis, Á.T. · 2026 · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21620933

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