Embryonic development of heads, skeletons and amphioxus: Edwin S. Goodrich revisited.

Abstract

0214-6282/2000/$20.00 © UBC Press Printed in Spain *Address for reprints: School of Animal and Microbial Sciences, University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 228, Reading, RG6 6AJ, United Kingdom. FAX: 0118931 6644. e-mail: p.w.h.holland@reading.ac.uk Edwin Stephen Goodrich was one of the greatest zoologists that Britain has ever produced (Fig. 1). Born in 1868, he spent most of his scientific career at the University of Oxford where he held the Linacre Chair of Zoology from 1921 until shortly before his death in 1946. Goodrich’s zoological discoveries, descriptions and theories included contributions to palaeontology, systematics, vertebrate anatomy, invertebrate anatomy, physiology and the nature of homology (Hardy, 1947). Remarkable diversity of interests was certainly one of Goodrich’s strengths, but it was not achieved at the expense of rigour or depth. On the contrary, the fields of evolutionary biology and comparative anatomy owe a great debt to the contributions of E.S. Goodrich. But what of developmental biology? Even though his most famous work includes ‘development’ in its title (Goodrich, 1930), Goodrich is certainly not considered to be a founding figure in developmental biology. Despite the fact that he published relatively few papers about embryos, several of Goodrich’s observations or hypotheses drawn from other fields have provided an important framework for understanding some recent findings in molecular developmental biology. Here, I revisit some of Goodrich’s findings in relation to recent research in developmental biology, focusing specifically on three subjects: the nature of amphioxus, segmentation of the vertebrate head, and patterning of the vertebrate skeleton. In the first two cases, research in my laboratory has helped to test hypotheses proposed by Goodrich; in the third case, others have added mechanistic detail to the theoretical framework he laid down. The nature of amphioxus