Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various small marine chordates of the group Conodonta of the Paleozoic Era and the Triassic Period, preserved primarily in the form of their conelike teeth.
  • noun A fossil tooth of this chordate. Conodonts are the most widespread Paleozoic microfossils and are important for biostratigraphic indexing.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A small glistening fossil organism, discovered by Pander in Silurian and Devonian rocks in Russia, and subsequently observed in other strata in different localities, and variously supposed to be a tooth of a cyclostomous fish, or a spine, hooklet, or denticle of a mollusk or an a˙nnelid: so named from its conical tooth-like appearance. These organisms are certainly not teeth of any vertebrates, and are probably the remains of worms.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Zoöl.) A peculiar toothlike fossil of many forms, found especially in carboniferous rocks. Such fossils are supposed by some to be the teeth of marsipobranch fishes, but they are probably the jaws of annelids.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Any of several extinct fishlike chordates that had conelike teeth
  • noun A microfossil tooth of such an animal

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun small (2 inches long) extinct eellike fish with a finned tail and a notochord and having cone-shaped teeth containing cellular bone; late Cambrian to late Triassic; possible predecessor of the cyclostomes
  • noun the tiny fossil cone-shaped tooth of a primitive vertebrate of order Conodonta

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Greek kōnos, cone; see kō- in Indo-European roots + –odont.]

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Examples

Comments

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  • "...marked with the spiral and circle of petrified brachiopod and trilobite and conodont, languid graptolites drifting after plankton frozen in one instant of their incessant trawl..."

    - Niall Griffiths, Sheepshagger

    January 15, 2008

  • The word conodont was coined in 1856 by C.H. Pander, a Russian paleontologist who studied Silurian fish fossils of Eastern Europe.

    July 15, 2010