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Palaeontology

A jaw-dropping fossil fish

Nature volume 502, pages 175–177 (2013)Cite this article

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The ancestors of modern jawed vertebrates are commonly portrayed as fishes with a shark-like appearance. But a stunning fossil discovery from China puts a new face on the original jawed vertebrate. See Article p.188

Jawed vertebrates, or gnathostomes, comprise the vast majority of backboned animals. Understanding their great success and the evolution of their anatomical marvels lies in reconstructing the nature of their most recent common ancestor. An entrenched assumption of classical comparative anatomy1, which has gained some recent palaeontological support2,3, is that this precursor resembled a shark. This hypothesis implies that the anatomical peculiarities of bony fishes — the group that would eventually give rise to ourselves — are specializations that arose later in vertebrate evolutionary history. On page 188 of this issue, Zhu et al.4 present a 419-million-year-old fossil and accompanying analysis that turn this view on its headFootnote 1.

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Figure 1: Evolution of the jawed-vertebrate face.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion were published online on 25 September 2013.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Matt Friedman is in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3AN, UK.,

    Matt Friedman

  2. Martin D. Brazeau is in the Department of Geology, and in the Department of Life Sciences, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, 2333 CR Leiden, the Netherlands, Imperial College London, UK.,

    Martin D. Brazeau

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  1. Matt Friedman
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  2. Martin D. Brazeau
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Correspondence to Matt Friedman or Martin D. Brazeau.

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Friedman, M., Brazeau, M. A jaw-dropping fossil fish. Nature 502, 175–177 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12690

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