Cyclostome is a
biological term (from the
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
for "round mouth") used in a few different senses:
* for the taxon
Cyclostomi, which comprises the extant
jawless fishes: the
hagfish
Hagfish, of the class Myxini (also known as Hyperotreti) and order Myxiniformes , are eel-shaped, slime-producing marine fish (occasionally called slime eels). They are the only known living animals that have a skull but no vertebral column, ...
(Myxini) and the
lamprey
Lampreys (sometimes inaccurately called lamprey eels) are an ancient extant lineage of jawless fish of the order Petromyzontiformes , placed in the superclass Cyclostomata. The adult lamprey may be characterized by a toothed, funnel-like s ...
s (Petromyzontidae). This was thought for a time to be a
paraphyletic group and this usage of the term was deprecated by some. However, there is strong molecular evidence for cyclostome
monophyly
In cladistics for a group of organisms, monophyly is the condition of being a clade—that is, a group of taxa composed only of a common ancestor (or more precisely an ancestral population) and all of its lineal descendants. Monophyletic gro ...
,
and thus the term remains in use.
* for the Order
Cyclostomatida
Cyclostomatida, or cyclostomata (also known as cyclostomes), are an ancient order of stenolaemate bryozoans which first appeared in the Lower Ordovician. It consists of 7+ suborders, 59+ families, 373+ genera, and 666+ species. The cyclostome b ...
of
bryozoans, tiny animals that live in colonies and form large calcitic skeletons.
* for one of two subgroups of
braconid
The Braconidae are a family of parasitoid wasps. After the closely related Ichneumonidae, braconids make up the second-largest family in the order Hymenoptera, with about 17,000 recognized species and many thousands more undescribed. One analysis ...
wasps.
References
{{Animal common name