http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Gray739-emphasizing-hippocampus.png

Non-mammalian species do not have a brain structure that looks like the mammalian hippocampus, but they have one that is considered homologous to it. The hippocampus, as pointed out above, is essentially the medial edge of the cortex. Only mammals have a fully developed cortex, but the structure it evolved from, called the pallium, is present in all vertebrates, even the most primitive ones such as the lamprey or hagfish. The pallium is usually divided into three zones: medial, lateral, and dorsal. The medial pallium forms the precursor of the hippocampus. It does not resemble the hippocampus visually, because the layers are not warped into an S shape or enwrapped by the dentate gyrus, but the homology is indicated by strong chemical and functional affinities. There is now evidence that these hippocampal-like structures are involved in spatial cognition in birds, reptiles, and fish. In birds, the correspondence is sufficiently well established that most anatomists refer to the medial pallial zone as the 'avian hippocampus'. The story for fish is more complex. In teleost fish (which make up the great majority of existing species), the forebrain is distorted in comparison to other types of vertebrates: most neuroanatomists believe that the teleost forebrain is essentially everted, like a sock turned inside-out, so that structures that lie in the interior, next to the ventricles, for most vertebrates, are found on the outside in teleost fish, and vice versa. One of the consequences of this is that the medial pallium ('hippocampal' zone) of a typical vertebrate is thought to correspond to the lateral pallium of a typical fish. Several types of fish (particularly goldfish) have been shown experimentally to have strong spatial memory abilities, even forming 'cognitive maps' of the areas they inhabit.[WP]

UBERON:0003940, UBERON:0004165

uberon

cornu ammonis, hippocampus, Ammons horn, Ammon horn fields

hippocampal

UBERON:0001954

• hippocampus fimbria
• hippocampal neuron
• hippocampus glial cell