Dental diversity in early chondrichthyans and the multiple origins of shedding teeth

The teeth of sharks famously form a series of parallel, continuously replacing files borne directly on the mandibular cartilages. In contrast, bony fishes possess site-specific shedding dentition borne on dermal plates. Understanding how these disparate systems evolved is challenging, not least because of poorly understood relationships and the profusion of morphologically and terminologically diverse bones, splints and whorls seen in the earliest chondrichthyans. Here we use tomographic methods to investigate the nature of mandibular structures in several early branching ‘acanthodian’-grade stem-chondrichthyans. We characterise the gnathal plates of ischnacanthids as growing bones, and draw similarities between early chondrichthyan and stem gnathostome teeth and jaws. We further build the case for Acanthodopsis, a Carboniferous taxon, as an acanthodid, and show that, unexpectedly, its teeth are borne directly on the mandibular cartilage. Mandibular splints are formed from dermal bone and appear to be an acanthodid synapomorphy. The development of a unidirectionally growing dentition may be a feature of the chondrichthyan total-group. More generally, ischnacanthid and stem gnathostome gnathal plates share a common construction and are likely homologous, and shedding teeth evolved twice in gnathostomes.