fish – Nix Illustration

Spectember/Spectober 2024 #06: Death Ray

Yeah, I’m keeping this stuff going again for another round of Spectober!

An anonymous request asked for a “big macropredatory ray”:

A shaded sketch of the head of a speculative descendant of pelagic stingrays. Its a large ray with triangular wing-like fins, a slightly shark-like pointed snout, protrusible sharp-toothed jaws, and a vaguely skull-like pale marking on its underside.

Speirobatis thanasima is a large ray found in open oceanic waters, reaching sizes comparable to the modern giant manta ray at around 3m in length (~10′) with a wingspan of over 5m (~16’5″).

But despite its body shape closely resembling that of mobulids or myliobatids, its closest present-day relative is actually the pelagic stingray. Already being active hunters with mouths full of sharp pointed teeth, these ancestral rays gradually evolved bigger body sizes and began occupying an apex predator niche similar to that of large sharks and toothed whales.

Speirobatis is a strong swimmer, using flapping motions of its triangular wing-like pectoral fins to travel at high speed and make acrobatic jumps out of the water. Highly intelligent and social, it lives in family groups that hunt cooperatively – encircling and herding schools of fish tightly into bait balls, taking turns stunning prey with slaps of their fins, and then grabbing incapacitated individuals with snaps of their protrusible jaws.

Groups will also tackle larger prey such as marine mammals and sharks, harassing and chasing targets to exhaustion while taking quick opportunistic bites out of them.

Allenypterus

Allenypterus montanus was an unusual early coelacanth that lived during the late Carboniferous, around 324 million years ago, in a tropical bay covering what is now central Montana, USA.

Up to about 15cm long (~6″), its tapering tadpole-like body plan somewhat resembled that of modern knifefishes and featherbacks, with the top part of its tail fin highly elongated into a ribbon-like shape and the rest of its tail fins being vestigial. The distinctive humped shape of its back was also much more pronounced in larger, more mature individuals.

It was probably a fairly slow swimmer, and preserved gut contents suggest it mainly ate small soft-bodied prey.

Its closest known relative seems to have been the eel-like Holopterygius – but since around 60 million years and different continents separated them both, this suggests the existence of a whole ghost lineage of other tapering coelacanths yet to be discovered.

Hemingwaya

Hemingwaya sarissa here was one of the earliest known billfish, related to modern sailfish and marlin. Living during the late Paleocene, about 58 million years ago, it inhabited the area around what is now Turkmenistan, in the warm shallow waters of the western Tethys Sea that covered much of central Asia at the time.

It was rather small compared to its modern relatives, just 30-40cm in length (~1′-1’4″), with a long streamlined body armored with six rows of scutes. Its slender snout was lined with tiny teeth, and both its first dorsal fin and first anal fin were tall and elongated.

It probably wasn’t a very active swimmer, instead hovering near the surface and catching smaller prey with quick bursts of speed.

Lessiniabatis

Lessiniabatis aenigmatica was a rather strange stingray.

It lived around 50-48 million years ago during the early Eocene, in a shallow warm sea covering what is now Italy, with its three known fossil specimens all coming from the fish-rich Monte Bolca fossil beds.

About 60cm long (~2′), it had a round pancake-like body similar to many modern seafloor-dwelling stingrays – but uniquely it was also almost tailless, with only a tiny, slender, stingless tail.

It wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer, instead probably spending most of its time buried in the muddy seafloor sediment. When on the move it likely swam along just above the surface of the seafloor using undulations of its fins, foraging for smaller bottom-dwelling animals like worms, molluscs, crustaceans, and fish.

Dunkleosteus

With its armored head and blade-like jaws, the placoderm fish Dunkleosteus terrelli is an iconic Paleozoic animal.

Living during the Late Devonian, about 375-359 million years ago, in subtropical waters covering parts of what are now North America and Europe, this species is known mostly just from the bony plates that covered its head and thorax. The rest of its skeleton was cartilaginous and rarely ever fossilized (only a few vertebrae and the pectoral fin are currently known), so its full body shape and size is poorly understood, and previous length estimates have ranged all the way up to 10m (33′).

…Except it turns out it wasn’t nearly that big.

Based on its head proportions, along with comparisons to more complete remains of other arthrodire placoderms, recent studies instead come up with a maximum length of about 4m (~13ft) – giving Dunkleosteus a much shorter-but-heavier chunky body shape, more like a tuna than a shark.

But even after this size revision Dunkleosteus would have still been one of the largest animals around at the time, with the ability to snap its jaws open at high speed and an incredibly strong bite force. It was probably specialized to mainly prey on other heavily-armored animals such as other placoderms and shelled cephalopods, and was likely a strong swimmer with a shark-like tail fin.

Preserved stomach contents in one fossil show remains of the fast-swimming cartilaginous fish Orodus – suggesting that much like the modern tuna it resembled, Dunkleosteus was also capable of bursts of high speed.

Rhombichthys

Ellimmichthyiformes were a group of ray-finned fish known from the early Cretaceous to the mid-Oligocene, about 140-30 million years ago. For much of that time they were quite widespread, found in various marine, estuarine, and freshwater environments across Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas.

Closely related to modern clupeiformes (herrings, sardines, and anchovies), and characterized by two rows of bony scutes – one in front of the dorsal fin and the other along the belly – they’re also known by the nickname “double‐armored herrings”.

Rhombichthys intoccabilis was a rather unusual-looking ellimmichthyiform from the mid-Cretaceous, around 95 million years ago. Living in shallow reef and lagoon waters covering what is now the West Bank in the Middle East, it was about 20cm long (~8″) and had a tall narrow dorsal fin along with incredibly elongated belly scutes that gave its body a rhombus-like profile.

Juveniles of this species seem to have lacked the extended belly scutes, instead having a much more rounded body shape. This may indicate that adults and juveniles occupied very different ecological roles, or that the distinctive scutes might have been a secondary sexual characteristic involved in displaying for courtship and reproduction.

Maghriboselache

Maghriboselache mohamezanei was a cartilaginous fish from the late Devonian Period, about 369 million years ago, living in the shallow marine waters that covered what is now the Anti-Atlas mountain range of Morocco in northwest Africa.

Up to around 2.5m long (~8′), it’s known from several exceptionally well-preserved and near-complete skeletons.

It had a streamlined body with large pectoral fins, small pelvic fins, and a strongly keeled crescent-shaped tail fin. And although it was superficially shark-like in appearance, it was actually part of a lineage known as cladoselachids, which were much closer related to modern chimaeras than to sharks.

It’s unclear if Maghriboselache had two dorsal fins like its close relative Cladoselache, but some specimens preserve evidence of a chunky spine where the front dorsal fin would have been. Others show no sign of a front dorsal fin or spine at all, suggesting there may have been some sexual dimorphism going on in this species, with males having a spine (and possibly also an associated front dorsal fin) and females only having a rear dorsal fin.

But the most unusual feature of Maghriboselache was its nose.

It had a very broad snout with large and unusually widely-spaced nostrils, which would have given it the ability to “smell in stereo” and determine the direction of scents carried through the water much more precisely – making it the earliest known example of that sort of sensory specialization.

Strange Symmetries #18: Flat Fish Friday

Modern flatfish are characterized by their highly asymmetrical skulls, with both eyes positioned on just one side of their head. They aren’t actually born this way, but instead they undergo “eye migration” as juveniles, twisting up their skulls to bring one eye across the top of the head.

Progressive eye migration in a developing Summer Flounder, *Paralicthys dentatus*.
From Helfman et al (2009). The diversity of fishes. 2nd ed., Wiley-Blackwell.

This bizarre arrangement is the result of flatfish adapting to life laying flat on the seafloor, but instead of slowly widening and flattening themselves out they took an evolutionary “shortcut” by simply tipping their tall narrow bodies over onto one side. Initially this would have left one of their eyes unusable, but random mutations causing slightly asymmetrical skulls would have rapidly become highly advantageous to the earliest members of this lineage – and over time they just got wonkier and wonkier.

We’ve even found fossils of early flatfish in the “halfway there” stage of their evolution!

Amphistium paradoxum lived in what is now northern Italy during the Eocene, around 50-48 million years ago. About 20cm long (~8″), it had one eye partially migrated towards the top of its head, but not all the way around yet, showing a transitional state between its bilaterally symmetric ancestors and its more twisted-skulled modern relatives.

Unlike most modern flatfish Amphistium came in both “right-eyed” and “left-eyed” forms in equal numbers, suggesting that a genetic preference for a specific side also hadn’t developed yet.

Strange Symmetries #15: Serrated Saw-Snoots

Long flattened snouts lined with pointy tooth-like denticles have convergently evolved at least three separate times in cartilaginous fish: in modern sawsharks and sawfish, and in the extinct sawskates.

This repeated “pristification” suggests that saws are just incredibly useful and relatively “easy to evolve” structures for these types of fish, being both highly sensitive to bioelectric fields and able to physically slash and stab to kill prey.

Onchopristis numida was a sawskate known from what is now Northern and Western Africa during the mid-Cretaceous, about 95 million years ago. Up to about 3m long (~10′), it lived in both saltwater and freshwater, and was probably a bottom-dwelling ambush predator similar to modern angelsharks.

Whenever a denticle was lost from its saw, a larger one would grow to replace it, and over the life of an Onchopristis this resulted in an increasingly extreme amount of saw asymmetry.

Modern pristified fish also have rather asymmetrical saws. Sawfish are commonly born with a different number of denticles on each side, while sawsharks add extra denticles of varying sizes as they age, with the ongoing replacement of lost denticles resulting in more uneven arrangements over their course of their lives.

It’s not clear if the asymmetry gives any sort of advantage to these fish – but if nothing else it probably doesn’t cause them any disadvantage, so there’s no evolutionary pressure to stay more symmetrical.

Serrasalmimus

The pycnodonts were a diverse group of ray-finned fish that were found in shallow coastal waters from the late Triassic to the late Eocene (~215-37 million years ago). They usually had deep but very narrow body shapes with a disc-like appearance, convergently similar to modern reef fish like marine angelfish or butterflyfish – but some looked much weirder, with elaborate horns and spines, lon g snouts, or vertically-stretched bodies.

Most of them also had jaws full of round flat teeth used to crush hard-shelled prey, but some may instead have been herbivorous grazers similar to parrotfish.

And a couple of lineages even became carnivores.

Serrasalmimus secans lived in what is now Morocco during the late Paleocene, about 59 million years ago. Although only known from its jaws, the size of the fossil material suggests it was fairly large for a pycnodont, possibly around 80cm long (~2’8″).

It had sharp flesh-cutting teeth similar to those of modern piranha, but with a surprising evolutionary twist. Unlike any other known ray-finned fish, Serrasalmimus‘ teeth were true shearing carnassials anchored into bony sockets, with new replacement teeth forming directly below each current tooth – a very specific arrangement of features previously only known in mammals.

This is an especially remarkable example of convergent evolution because on land placental carnivorans were developing their own carnassials at the same time, just a few million years after the K-Pg mass extinction. Both mammals and pycnodonts were simultaneously taking advantage of the vacant predatory roles in their respective ecosystems, and ended up with incredibly similar tooth adaptations as a result.