Word Finder - cartilaginous

definition

Comprising soft cartilage rather than bone

example

Cartilaginous fish such as the angler fish have a skeletal structure made up of cartilage.

definition

Related to or resembling cartilage

definition

Having a tough or fibrous texture, usually in reference to a mushroom stipe

The trachea or windpipe is strengthened by numerous cartilaginous, often osseous, complete rings, but in the emeu several of these rings are incomplete in the medioventral line, and permit the inner lining of the trachea to bulge out into a large neck-pouch, which is used by both sexes as a resounding bag.

The skeleton is cartilaginous, and the skull is remarkable for the very elongate suspensorium of the lower jaw; the tail remains in the notochordal condition, no cartilages being formed in this organ, which is destined to disappear with the gills.

The intervertebral joints are further complicated by the interposition of a cartilaginous or fibrous pad or ring.

The keel, or carina sterni, is formed as a direct cartilaginous outgrowth of the body of the sternum, ossifying from a special centre.

It is absent in the Ratitae, which from this feature have received their name, but considerable traces of a cartilaginous keel occur in the embryo of the ostrich, showing undeniably that the absence of a keel in the recent bird is not a primitive, fundamental feature.

The anterior half of the sclerotic is composed of a ring of some ten to seventeen cartilaginous or bony scales which partly overlap each other.

In humming-birds and petrels the trachea is partly divided by a vertical, longitudinal, cartilaginous septum.

Essential are vibrating membranes between the cartilaginous framework, and next, special muscles for regulating the tension.

In both cases the socalled fruit is composed of the receptacle or upper end of the flower-stalk (the so-called calyx tube) greatly dilated, and enclosing within its cellular flesh the five cartilaginous carpels which constitute the "core" and are really the true fruit.

But it was now made to appear that the struthious birds in this respect resembled, not only the duck, but a great many other groups - waders, birds-of-prey, pigeons, passerines and perhaps all birds not gallinaceous - so that, according to Cuvier's view, the five points of ossification observed in the Gallinae, instead of exhibiting the normal process, exhibited one quite exceptional, and that in all other birds, so far as he had been enabled to investigate the matter, ossification of the sternum began at two points only, situated near the anterior upper margin of the side of the sternum, and gradually crept towards the keel, into which it presently extended; and, though he allowed the appearance of detached portions of calcareous matter at the base of the still cartilaginous keel in ducks at a certain age, he seemed to consider this an individual peculiarity.

The duck, on the other hand, when newly hatched, and for nearly a month after, has the sternum wholly cartilaginous.

A pyloric caecum connected with the stomach is commonly found, containing a tough flexible cylinder of transparent cartilaginous appearance, called the " crystalline style " (Mactra).

Epidermal appendages are rare, the most frequent being marginal, saw-like, cartilaginous teeth, usually minute, but occasionally (Danthonia scabra, Panicum serratum) so large as to give the margin a serrate appearance.

Chitin is not exclusively an ectodermal product, but occurs also in cartilaginous skeletal plates of mesoblastic origin (connective tissue).

In some the notochord remains for a long time exposed along the ventral surface, and, owing to the absence of cartilaginous formation around it, disappears without ever becoming invested otherwise than by a thin elastic membrane; it can be easily stripped off below the vertebrae in larval specimens on the point of metamorphosing.

Ridewood (30), the whole hyobranchial apparatus forms a cartilaginous continuum, and during metamorphosis the branchialia disappear without a trace.

The carpus, which remains cartilaginous in many of the Stegocephalia and Caudata, contains six to eight elements when the manus is fully developed, whilst the number is reduced in those forms which have only two or three digits.

Of the cartilaginous fishes, Chondropterygii, the true sharks and hammer-headed sharks, are numerous.

The entosternites are cartilaginous in texture, but they have neither the chemical character nor the microscopic structure of the hyaline cartilage of Vertebrates.

Its upper extremity embraces the lower surface of the cartilaginous ear-conch; its lower end reaches the level of the inferior margin of the mandible, along the posterior margin of which it is placed.