Some types of fish even have a second set of jaws called pharyngeal jaws, which extend from inside the external jaws - just like those in the horrifying xenomorph in the "Alien" movies, according to Witmer. The number of bones in vertebrates' skulls, how they fit together and where they fuse to each other varies widely, and can reflect how the skull is used by the animal and how much flexibility it requires, said Larry Witmer, a professor of anatomy and paleontology with the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Ohio University.įish, for instance, have highly mobile skulls that mobility is possible because they have more skull bones and fewer fusions than most other vertebrates, Witmer told Live Science. "Typically numbers are probably in the range of 130 or so," he said. "Fishes vary in the number of bones in their heads," Sidlauskas told Live Science in an email. The greatest number of skull bones by far - 156 - occurs in the fossil of an extinct fish, said Brian Sidlauskas, an associate professor and Curator of Fishes with the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University. "I would say that you could probably find marsupial species with close to that number of skull bones," Tseng said. Mammal fetuses have approximately 43 bones that are developmentally distinct, "but some of them fuse as mammals grow," and the number of fused bones may differ among mammal groups, Jack Tseng, a functional anatomist at the University at Buffalo, told Live Science in an email.
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