Scientists at Curtin University and Flinders University claim to have found “the heart of our evolution” in the fossil of a fish found in a rock formation in Kimberley region of Western Australia claimed to be 380 million years old. This age puts it in the Devonian period of the evolutionary timetable, and the Editor’s […]
Category: Fish
Seaweed Eating Shark Surprise
The whale shark is the world’s biggest fish, growing up to 18 metres (59ft) long, but it is not a fierce predator. It is a filter feeder that cruises the ocean scooping up krill and small fish. Scientists at Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) studying the diet of whale sharks living around Ningaloo Reef […]
Seahorse Dads Built for Birth
Seahorse and pipefish have an unusual method of reproduction – males carry developing babies in a brood pouch and give birth to live young. Scientists at Sydney University have studied the process of how males gave birth. They originally thought it would be like the female birth process in other vertebrates that give birth to […]
Shark Toothache
Researchers from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have studied a deformed tooth from the extinct giant shark Otodus megalodon (used to be Carcharodon megalodon)and compared it with similarly deformed teeth from a shark named Carcharhinus leucas, which still lives today. The teeth all show a “double tooth pathology” […]
Melting Glaciers Make More Salmon Rivers
Glaciers in the Pacific Northwest of USA and Canada are melting and turning into streams of flowing fresh water. Scientists from the University of Birmingham have studied some of these new rivers and found salmon had colonised them when migrating from the ocean into rivers in order to spawn. These scientists have joined with Kara […]
Seahorse Suction Power
Seahorse suction power revealed in reports in Inside JEB 3 September 2021 and Journal of Experimental Biology 3 September 2021, doi: 10.1242/jeb.236430. Seahorses use suction feeding to draw food in which involves a rapid expansion of their mouth cavity to force food into the mouth. Other kinds of ‘sucking’ fish use their swimming muscles to […]
Megashark Gets More Mega
Megashark gets more mega, according to Science Alert and SciTechDaily 9 June 2021, and Palaeontologia Electronica DOI: 10.26879/1140. The size of the extinct giant fossil shark now named Otodus megalodon (used to be Carcharodon) has been re-estimated using the size of its teeth compared with teeth from the living Great White shark, then using the […]
Fish Fins Forming Limbs
Fish fins forming limbs found, according to articles in BBC Science Focus and ScienceDaily 4 February 2021 and Cell 4 February 2021 doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.01.003. Scientists at Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital have found mutations of two genes that result in the formation of extra bones in the pectoral (front) fins of zebrafish. Zebrafish are ray-finned […]
Giant Fish Fossil Found With Pterodactyl
Giant fish fossil found with pterodactyl, reported by University of Portsmouth news and PhysOrg 15 February 2021, ScienceDaily 16 February 2021, and Cretaceous Research published online 23 January 2021 doi: 10.1016/j.cretres.2021.104768. Scientists from University of Portsmouth were asked to identify a fossil bony structure found with a group of wing bones from a pterosaur. The […]
How Big is a Mega Shark?
How big is a mega shark? Really huge, according to reports in ScienceDaily 3 September 2020, SciTech Daily 4 September 2020 and Scientific Reports, 3 September 2020; doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-71387-y. Because sharks have a skeleton made of cartilage, rather than bone, fossils of whole sharks are very rare, so it is difficult to estimate their exact […]