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Palaeontology

Plenty of fish in the tree

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

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Figure 1: The evolution of ray-finned fishes.

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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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