Written Rays

Many of the papers that appear in preliminary searches concerning Heliobatis either use the ray for comparison or note a collection of fauna from a given locality. These are of great worth to us in that they both require descriptive text about Heliobatis and both types of writing tend to provide or ascribe behaviors or habitat information to the sun ray. These are, in turn, both useful for understanding the organism and its environment and generating more hypotheses about the animal and its life history. As mentioned previously, the teeth of this ray are typically well preserved and they have been studied frequently in conjunction with the teeth of other fossil rays to discuss phylogeny, differences in environment, and in the context of dental evolution. In some instances, all three of these topics are discussed, to a point of course; that is a lot of information to attempt to shoehorn into a single paper. There are papers that discuss locomotion of skates and rays as well, using Heliobatis and other rays pelvic girdles to predict what their swimming will look like.