Controversy has long surrounded the interrelationship between hagfish, lampreys and jawed vertebrates. Box 1 summarizes current views, and in Fig. 1 we show hagfish diverging either before the ...

Hagfishes (Myxini) are sometimes referred to as slime eels and occasionally as snot snakes, but they are neither eel nor reptile. They are fishes, but belong to an exclusive group called cyclostomes, ...

Today, the opposite is true. Lampreys and hagfish are the only surviving groups of the once-dominant jawless vertebrates. They are among the most primitive living vertebrates, so studying their ...

Jawless vertebrates once dominated Paleozoic waters, but just two lineages persisted to the present day: lampreys and hagfishes. Living lampreys are a relatively small clade, with just over fifty ...