Garstang, Walter

A Dictionary of Zoology

Garstang, Walter (1868–1949) A comparative anatomist and embryologist who was the first person to propose, in 1928, that vertebrates arose from a neotenous ascidian (neoteny, Ascidiacea) larva. Somewhat diffident about his more radical evolutionary hypotheses, he propounded them in anonymous comic verses that he would leave scattered about the laboratory for his students to find.

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© A Dictionary of Zoology 1999, originally published by Oxford University Press 1999.

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