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The Placoderms: Where Are They Now?

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The Placoderms: Where Are They Now?

Introduction
Fish have been around for hundreds of millions of years and probably will be for hundreds of millions of years more. This group of organisms is very diverse and contains everything from jawless fish, such as lampreys, to fish with cartilaginous skeletons, such as the sharks and rays, to fish with bones, which consist of basically every other living fish. Today, this group has huge variations in body plans and lifestyles, a huge amount of diversity, and can be found throughout the aquatic environment. This type of fish community was not always present in the waters of the world. At one time, long ago, the assemblage of fish looked hugely different, mainly because of the existence of a now extinct …show more content…

Papers
A survey, as far as this paper is concerned, is a review of a body of scientific literature that is conducted to draft a hypothesis involving some kind of topic. This is in contrast to a scientific paper, which as far as this paper is concerned, is a work of scientific literature that uses data collected by the authors and/or experimentation in order to draw hypotheses and conclusions. That being said, both of these kinds of papers have equal value. They both make informed conclusions with the data they are given and can act as a stepping stone for future research.
Out of the sources I used to uncover the reason(s) for the extinction of the placoderms, five of the papers were surveys. These sources were the papers by Sallan and Coates, Bambach, Freidman and Sallan, Carr, and Young. All five of these surveys used a large body of scientific literature to hypothesize about the factors that led to the Devonian extinction, the extinction of the placoderms, or both. Out of these five papers, only one of them, the Sallan and Coates paper, described the methods behind their analysis of the sources. This is likely because the Sallan and Coates paper was the only one of the five listed above that conducted a statistical analysis of any kind. In this paper, the authors took species, geographic, and taxonomic data, and used this data to construct the changing diversity in gnathostomes, or jawed vertebrates, during and on either side of the Devonian extinction. The other papers simply drew conclusions based on the literature that they

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