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Catching the first fish

Nature volume 402, pages 21–22 (1999)Cite this article

Most major animal groups appear suddenly in the fossil record 550 million years ago, but vertebrates have been absent from this ‘Big Bang’ of life. Two fish-like animals from Early Cambrian rocks now fill this gap.

The search for the deep past of the vertebrates has been a pet subject of palaeontologists during the past decade. Traditionally, the fossil record of fishes and their descendants is good from the present to the Early Silurian period, about 430 million years (Myr) ago, then very poor in the Ordovician period (until about 480 Myr ago), and totally lacking or controversial before that, in the earliest Ordovician and Cambrian periods (from 480 to 550 Myr ago) and earlier. On page 42 of this issue, Shu et al.1 report the discovery of two fish-like fossils from Chengjiang in Yunnan, China, that are probably the long-awaited Early Cambrian vertebrates.

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Figure 1: The current phylogenetic tree of the major living and fossil vertebrate groups.

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  1. the Laboratoire de Paléontologie (UMR 8569 du CNRS), Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 8 rue Buffon, Paris, 75005, France

    Philippe Janvier

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  1. Philippe Janvier
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Janvier, P. Catching the first fish. Nature 402, 21–22 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/46909

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