Abstract
The primary digestive organ of Nautilus is a powerful, remarkably well developed buccal mass; it is distinguished from those of modern dibranchiate cephalopods by the presence of prominent calcified deposits and by the shorter inner lamellae of the lower jaw (Teichert et al., 1964a; Gasiorowski, 1973; Müller, 1974; Okutani and Mikami, 1977; Saunders et al., 1978). The mouth-part anatomy of Nautilus has been described in some detail previously (Owen, 1832; Vayssière, 1896; Griffin, 1900; Naef, 1923; Stenzel, 1964; Solem and Richardson, 1975; Okutani and Mikami, 1977). These works demonstrated that the buccal mass of Nautilus differs from those of coleoids in the nature of both jaw and radular structures. Detailed relationships of the soft and hard tissues, however, have not been examined fully. In this chapter, we describe such relationships on the basis of investigations using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and discuss their functional meanings as they pertain to feeding.
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Tanabe, K., Fukuda, Y. (2010). Mouth Part Histology and Morphology. In: Saunders, W.B., Landman, N.H. (eds) Nautilus. Topics in Geobiology, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3299-7_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3299-7_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-3298-0
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-3299-7
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