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Palaeontology

Something fishy in the family tree

Nature volume 397, pages 564–565 (1999)Cite this article

Where did the bony fishes come from? This simple question illustrates a theme, the quest for origins, which has been central to evolutionary biology since its birth as a discipline. Great effort has been expended on tracing the beginnings of the major groups of organisms in the fossil record. This research has had its successes, but has been curiously frustrating — time and again, the vaunted ‘basal’ forms it has uncovered have confounded expectations, leaving us as much puzzled as enlightened. Now, Zhu et al.(page 607 of this issue1) uncover another example of this pattern: they present a basal bony fish with such an unexpected mix of characteristics that it forces a reconsideration of large parts of the vertebrate family tree.

The ‘bony fishes’, Osteichthyes, a group which in fact also includes the land vertebrates or tetrapods, and thus ourselves, is by far the largest group of backboned animals. It musters some 50,000 species, as against roughly 700 sharks, rays and chimaeras, and a mere handful of jawless lampreys and hagfishes. The group's ecological importance is incalculable. It might seem odd to unite animals as different as a cod (a decent bony fish by any measure) and a human being in the same group, but all osteichthyans have a suite of common features which show beyond doubt that they share a single common ancestry. Tetrapods have evolved from more orthodox bony fishes2. Clearly, the origin of the osteichthyans was a momentous event in the history of life, but attempts to investigate this event always come up against a baffling barrier.

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Figure 1: Fish relationships and the ambiguous position of Psarolepis.

References

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  1. the Department of Palaeontology, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, SW7 5BD, London, UK

    Per Erik Ahlberg

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  1. Per Erik Ahlberg
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Ahlberg, P. Something fishy in the family tree. Nature 397, 564–565 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/17484

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