Craniates, one of the three subdivisions of chordates, have distinct skulls-including hagfish, which have no vertebrae. Michael J. Benton comments, craniates are characterized by their heads, just as chordates, or possibly all deuterostomes, are by their tails.t has also proved difficult to produce a detailed classification within the living chordates. Attempts to produce evolutionary  family trees  give results that differ from traditional classes because several of those classes are not monophyletic. As a result, vertebrate classification is in a state of flux.
The skeletal muscle fibers contract when the sarcomere in the myofibrils contract. The contraction of the sarcomeres is explained by the sliding filament theory. (The word theory is used here in its scientific sense as meaning generally accepted laws and principles, as in the theory of evolution.).he plasma membrane of the skeletal muscle fiber is called a sarcolemma. The muscle fiber contains long cylindrical structures, the myofibrils. The myofibrils almost entirely fill the cell and push the nuclei to the outer edges of the cell under the sarcolemma.
Neuromuscular Junction Skeletal muscle cells contract as a result of impulses from motor neurons. The place where a motor neuron stimulates a muscle cell is called a neuromuscular junction. In order for skeletal muscle cells to contract each cell must be stimulated by a process of a motor neuron.Sliding Filament Theory The theory of how muscle contracts is the sliding filament theory.The contraction of a muscle occurs as the thin filament slide past the thick filaments.n skeletal muscle, the cells never contract individually. Rather they contract as groups of muscle cells that are collectively connected to a motor nerve originating in the spinal cord. The combination of the motor nerve cell (neuron) and the muscle cells it innervates is known as the motor unit.