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progenitors

n. (plural of progenitor English)

Usage examples of "progenitors".

As the embryonic state of each species and group of species partially shows us the structure of their less modified ancient progenitors, we can clearly see why ancient and extinct forms of life should resemble the embryos of their descendants,--our existing species.

As natural selection acts only by the accumulation of slight modifications of structure or instinct, each profitable to the individual under its conditions of life, it may reasonably be asked, how a long and graduated succession of modified architectural instincts, all tending towards the present perfect plan of construction, could have profited the progenitors of the hive-bee?

If, moreover, they had been the progenitors of these orders, they would almost certainly have been long ago supplanted and exterminated by their numerous and improved descendants.

We may thus account even for the distinctness of whole classes from each other--for instance, of birds from all other vertebrate animals--by the belief that many ancient forms of life have been utterly lost, through which the early progenitors of birds were formerly connected with the early progenitors of the other vertebrate classes.

Why do we not find great piles of strata beneath the Silurian system, stored with the remains of the progenitors of the Silurian groups of fossils?

I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.

Repetition is the way our progenitors socialized us to function in the daily world.

Chinese records say that the progenitors of the Chinese race came from across the sea.

There are practical difficulties in following out this suggestion, but possibly the forethought of your progenitors, or that concurrence of circumstances which we call accident, may have arranged this for you.