Myotomes Sentence Examples
The generic characters are based upon definite modifications of form which affect the entire facies of the animals, while the specific diagnoses depend upon minor characters, such as the number of myotomes or muscle-segments.
The Peruvian species, Branchiostoma elongatum, with nearly eighty myotomes, cannot at present be assigned to its proper subgenus.
The main musculature can be seen through the thin skin to be divided into about sixty pairs of muscle-segments (myotomes) by means of comma-shaped dissepiments, the myocommas, which stretch between the skin and the central skeletal axis of the body.
These myotomes enable it to swim rapidly with characteristic serpentine undulations of the body, the movements being effected by the alternate contraction and relaxation of the longitudinal muscles on both sides.
Apparently correlated with this peculiar locomotion is the anatomical fact of the alteration of the myotomes on the two sides.
Symmetrical at their first appearance in the embryo, the somites (from which the myotomes are derived) early undergo a certain distortion, the effect of which is to carry the somites of the left side forwards through the length of one half-segment.
In Asymmetron the caudal region is remarkable for the curious elongation of the notochord, which is produced far beyond the last of the myotomes.
Corresponding with each pair of myotomes, and subject to the same alternation, two pairs of spinal nerves arise from the neurochord, namely, a right and left pair of compact dorsal sensory roots without ganglionic enlargement, and a right and left pair of ventral motor roots composed of loose fibres issuing separately from the neurochord and passing directly to their termination on the muscle-plates of the myotomes.
A similar constitution of the body is more clearly seen in the Chaetopod worms. In the Vertebrata also a repetition of units of structure (myotomes, vertebrae, &c.) - which is essentially of the same nature as the repetition in Arthropods and Chaetopods, but in many respects subject to peculiar developments - is observed.