A parietal eye, also known as a third eye or pineal eye, is a part of the epithalamus present in some vertebrates. The eye is located at the top of the head, is photoreceptive and is associated with the pineal gland, regulating circadian rhythmicity and hormone production for thermoregulation. The hole in the head which contains the eye is known as a pineal foramen or parietal foramen, since it is often enclosed by the parietal bones. Presence in various animals The parietal eye is found in the tuatara, most lizards, frogs, salamanders, certain bony fish, sharks, and lampreys. It is absent in mammals, but was present in their closest extinct relatives, the therapsids, suggesting it was lost during the course of the mammalian evolution due to it being useless in endothermic animals. It is also absent in the ancestrally endothermic ("warm-blooded") archosaurs such as birds. The parietal eye is also lost in ectothermic ("cold-blooded") archosaurs like crocodilians, and in turtles, which may be grouped with archosaurs in Archelosauria. Despite being lepidosaurs, as lizards and tuatara are, snakes lack a parietal eye. Anatomy The third eye, where present, is always much smaller than the main paired eyes, and, in living species, it is always covered by skin, and is usually not readily visible externally. The parietal eye is a part of the epithalamus, which can be divided into two major parts; the epiphysis (the pineal organ, or pineal gland if mostly endocrine) and the parapineal organ (often called the parietal eye, or if it is photoreceptive, the third eye). These structures arise as a single anterior evagination of the pineal organ or as a separate outgrowth of the roof of the diencephalon, but during development it divides into two more or less bilaterally symmetric organs which rotate their location to become a caudal pineal organ and a parapineal organ. In some species, it protrudes through the skull. The parietal eye uses a different biochemical method of detecting light from that of rod cells or cone cells in a normal vertebrate eye. Many of the oldest fossil vertebrates, including ostracoderms, placoderms, crossopterygians, and even early tetrapods, had a socket in the skull that appears to have held a functional third eye. This socket remains as a foramen between the parietal bones even in many living amphibians and reptiles, although it has vanished in birds and mammals. Lampreys have two parietal eyes, one