Article: Fossil fishes: So much diversity, so little change

Fishes embody one of the greatest paradoxes of vertebrate evolution: While they are phenomenally diverse--accounting for more than half the world's total vertebrate species--they have retained essentially the same anatomical plan for 450 million years. If we could go fishing in the Devonian period, between 360 and 400 million years ago, we would still recognize our catch as fishes, although we would notice several curious features. Familiar categories, such as sharks and rayfinned bony fishes (which are distant relatives of today's paddlefishes, gars, salmon, and perch), would be comparatively rare. But we would discover far greater diversity and ahundance among lobe-finned relatives of the ...

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