My hope is that fish paleo can show just how special these animals are, and how much we need to protect them. And by revealing the great diversity of fishes they emerged from, we can understand how evolution drives fish groups to evolve, thrive, dwindle, or go extinct.
Species are not just objects of natural curiosity. They provide a window into history and nature that is invaluable. With every species that goes extinct, we lose a part of ourselves and a piece of our natural resources that sustain and fulfill our lives.
Paddlefish photo
The American Paddlefish is the last member of a lineage that stretches into the Mesozoic. With the extinction of the Chinese Paddlefish, it stands alone as our connection to some of the deepest parts of our natural heritage.
Sturgeon and Paddlefish are sadly under threat. These beautiful animals, which survived the KT extinction, are a part of our shared natural heritage as a species. A very old and irreplaceable part of the history of life that is at threat.
I think with tools like CT scans, photo stacking, and a community dedicated to it, we now have the ability to integrate historic fossils within a unified phylogenetic framework with living ray-finned fishes. It will be a lot of work, so why do it? Why does it matter?
Work like this on Chondrosteus, and work to describe new material from Errolichthys from China (and revisit the original specimen?), has enormous potential to unravel sturgeon history. It is one out of dozens of fascinating strands of fish history that remain tangled in the Triassic.
Now for those candidates! Among the “sub-Holosteans”, there is the strange case of Errolichthys. It is from the Early Triassic of Madagascar and Spitsbergen. I tested coding it in my dissertation framework to see if I could resolve its position, but there is not enough info in the original papers.
Untangling those groups will be a massive task. But the path forward is highlighted by work by people like Gloria Arratia, who has untangled the early history of the teleost ray-finned fishes (the most diverse vertebrates ever) in the Middle and Late Triassic. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...
I have shifted the focus of my explorations to the Triassic recently because I think the tangled wastebaskets are hiding important diversity of both extinct and living groups. It is, in my opinion, the age of ray-finned fishes. All the major groups were present and diverse.
Panel figure showing a fossil fish photo and drawing
Work on living ray-finned fishes is not just for phylogenetics. It is also essential to unraveling the anatomy and taxonomy of Permian and Triassic finds, such as understanding how the actinopterygian skeleton grows for figuring out that this little guy is osteologically mature.
Figure from Stack et al. 2025 showing process of making characters
Essentially, we need to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle (skeleton) have evolved and fit together to interpret living and fossil fish evolution. This is the basis of building characters that we use to infer evolutionary history. I summarized this process below.
Having detailed descriptions of the internal and external anatomy of younger fossils and extant animals is absolutely necessary for parsing out older fossils. That’s why I cite Lance Grande, Willy Bemis, and Eric Hilton’s works on gar, bowfin, and sturgeon ~ a million times in my dissertation.
Sub-Holosteans are a hodge podge of groups whose anatomy is a weird mix of traits we see in Paleozoic fishes and traits that look more modern. Many have debated phylogenetic position and need careful re-study and testing. This is why work like Matt and Sam’s on Chondrosteus is so important.
Illustrations of fossil fishes from a book
The biggest problem is that the Triassic is a time of major diversification within ray-finned fishes, meaning that there are a ton of forms and lots of convergence. I usually talk about my beloved “palaeoniscoids”, but the Triassic spawns the “sub-Holosteans”, which is a wastebasket as well.
Great thread on a cool animal and a major problem: where do sturgeon come from? I still wish we could find a Triassic acipenseriform, there are a few candidates. But, the Triassic presents a daunting challenge to parsing out lineages that are gave rise to the fishes we have today.
Not in academia but Cam James on YouTube does extremely thorough and well-researched videos on scams and grifting at all levels in the US.
Tiny branching fossil on a brachiopod
This kind of thing
Encrusting animals from a bunch of Devonian brachiopods from Michigan, have a student working on them now.
My brachiopod project is now largely a bryozoan and coral project. Exciting times!
@reallyoldfish.bsky.social
Excellent can’t wait to read!
Looking at articles on Zookeys and Zootaxa is far too much fun. I can’t get enough of all the awesome taxonomy that’s being done around the world. So much amazing work!
Cover of the journal Nature, featuring the head of a large fish with its mouth open. A smaller fish is swimming into its mouth. The cover reads "Caught in Time: Early fossils shed light on the origins of bony fish."
Osteichthyans--the bony fishes--are by far the most diverse group of living jawed vertebrates. Two papers out today in @nature.com feature remarkable new Chinese fossils that paint a picture of substantial morphological diversity among stem osteichthyans.
My notebook
This is my artificial intelligence writing assistant, it provides work-flow enhancement and doubles as a fly swatter. I write much more efficiently with it! I’d like a 50 billion dollar evaluation please.
This is correct
He's perfect to me (from Moy-Thomas and Bradley Dyne (1938).
Most normal Permian animal
Paper looks very interesting but this is the most terrifying figure I have ever seen.
🐊 Fish (Lent)
Blank white wall
Wilson Fisk looking at a wall
Enjoying the decor in my office
