Beyond the Age of Fishes

Abstract

As a rule, the earliest fossils of living groups tend to be scrappy, and such fragments lend themselves to contentious interpretations. For 'bony fishes', Osteichthyes — the division of vertebrates that includes everything from humans to halibut — the record of articulated fossils peters out within the Lower Devonian1, some 400 million years ago. Earlier stretches of osteichthyan history are littered with fossil detritus, such as isolated teeth and scales. In certain instances, bits and pieces have been reassembled into conjectural species2,3,4, some of which have surprising combinations of anatomical features2. On page 469 of this issue, Zhu et al.5 introduce a fresh — albeit long-dead — fish into this poorly resolved patch of vertebrate evolution. Crucially, this piscine offshoot of our own distant past is both unusually intact and exceptionally old.