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Palaeontology

Fossil fish up for election

Nature volume 403, pages 152–153 (2000)Cite this article

The bony fishes (osteichthyans) were the progenitors of tetrapods, without which none of us would be here. So we have good reason to be interested in bony-fish evolutionary history. The group is div-ided into the ray-finned and lobe-finned fishes, and recently discovered early bony-fish specimens have a mixture of characters of each type. Moreover, these specimens show some features formerly thought to be present only in the more primitive cartilaginous fishes (chondrichthyans — sharks and rays) and an extinct group called placoderms. So palaeontologists have been puzzling over which group the new forms should be assigned to, and how all of the various groups are related to each other.

On page 185 of this issue1, Basden et al. report on another bony-fish fossil that comes from southeastern Australia and is designated AM101607. It looks ray-fin- like, but it also exhibits some characters previously found only in lobe-finned fishes and others found only in chondrichthyans and placoderms. Last year, Zhu et al.2 discussed another fish of this kind, Psarolepis, from China and Vietnam, which had been earlier described by Yu3 and is more lobe-fin-like in appearance. Both Psarolepis and AM101607 are from the Early Devonian period, about 400 million years ago, and so are among the oldest bony fishes known. The respective authors1,2 each propose that the specimen they describe is a candidate to be a member of the basal group (the ‘ancestor’) of bony fishes, but Basden et al.1 consider that their fish is the more promising contender.

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Figure 1: Similar patterning of the skull roof of Devonian fossil ray-finned fishes from Australia.
Figure 2: Fish braincases in lateral view, showing the eyestalk, or its base or site of attachment (all marked as E; see also Fig. 2 on page 186).

References

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  1. the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, PO Box 643, Beijing, 100044, China

    Meemann Chang

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  1. Meemann Chang
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Correspondence to Meemann Chang.

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Chang, M. Fossil fish up for election. Nature 403, 152–153 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35003093

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