image: Anciently derived cartilaginous fishes, such as sharks and skates, are vertebrates with non-ossified cartilage skeletons. The cartilages of the little skate (Leucoraja erinacea) skeleton shown here are visualized by Alcian blue staining. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the Dec. 16, 2011, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Benjamin L. King at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Salisbury Cove, Me., and colleagues, was titled, “A Natural Deletion of the HoxC Cluster in Elasmobranch Fishes.” view more
Credit: Image courtesy of Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL)