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Palaeontology

Plenty of fish in the tree

Nature volume 549, pages 167–169 (2017)Cite this article

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Polypterid fish were considered to be archaic outliers of the bony-fish grouping. Fossil analysis now places them at the heart of early ray-finned fishes, a radical change that transforms the timing of their evolution. See Letter p.265

A proverbial 'odd fish', the bichir (Polypterus) is so extraordinary that the palaeontologist Georges Cuvier claimed that its discovery alone justified Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt1. Its unusual mixture of seemingly primitive and highly specialized features, perhaps best exemplified by the distinctive characteristics of its muscular pectoral fins2,3, has led to a lengthy and convoluted classification history. The settled consensus on the basis of genetic and fossil analysis4 is that polypterids (Polypterus and its sister genus, Erpetoichthys) are members of the ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii), so-called because their fins are mostly supported by slender bony rays, rather than by the predominantly muscular (but also ray-bearing) appendages of lobe-finned fishes.

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Figure 1: The evolution of ray-finned fishes.

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  1. the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, 60637, Illinois, USA

    Michael Coates

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  1. Michael Coates
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Correspondence to Michael Coates.

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Coates, M. Plenty of fish in the tree. Nature 549, 167–169 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/549167a

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