Bichir

For the Lebanese-Mexican family, see Bichir family.

Bichir
Temporal range: Late Cretaceous–Recent[1]
Nile bichir Polypterus bichir
Barred bichir Polypterus delhezi
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Actinopterygii
Subclass: Cladistia
Order: Polypteriformes
Bleeker, 1859
Family: Polypteridae
Bonaparte, 1835
Type species
Polypterus bichir
Genera

Erpetoichthys
Polypterus
See text for species.

Red: Polypterus extant , Light red: Polypterus possibly extant , Blue: Erpetoichthys extant

Bichirs /ˈbɪʃɪərz/ and the reedfish comprise Polypteridae /pɒlɪpˈtɛrɪdiː/, a family of archaic ray-finned fishes and the only family in the order Polypteriformes /pəˈlɪptərɪfɔːrmiːz/.[2]

All the species occur in freshwater habitats in tropical Africa and the Nile River system, mainly swampy, shallow floodplains and estuaries.

Cladistia, polypterids and their fossil relatives, are considered the sister group to all other extant ray-finned fishes (Actinopteri).[3][4] They likely diverged from Actinopteri at least 330 million years ago. A closely related group, the Scanilepiformes, are known from the later Permian to the Triassic, and are likely ancestral to polypterids. The oldest polypterids are around 100 million years old, from the early Late Cretaceous of South America and Africa.[5][6][7]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference EoF was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Helfman GS, Collette BB, Facey DE, Bowen BW. 2009. The Diversity of Fishes. West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing. 720 p.
  3. ^ Suzuki, D.; Brandley, M. C.; Tokita, M. (2010). "The mitochondrial phylogeny of an ancient lineage of ray-finned fishes (Polypteridae) with implications for the evolution of body elongation, pelvic fin loss, and craniofacial morphology in Osteichthyes". BMC Evolutionary Biology. 10: 209. doi:10.1186/1471-2148-10-209. PMC 3055249. PMID 20624284.
  4. ^ Dai Suzuki, Matthew C. Brandley, Masayoshi Tokita: CORRECTION: The mitochondrial phylogeny of an ancient lineage of ray-finned fishes (Polypteridae) with implications for the evolution of body elongation, pelvic fin loss, and craniofacial morphology in Osteichthyes. BMC Evolutionary Biology. Bd. 10, Art.-Nr. 209, 2010, doi:10.1186/1471-2148-10-209
  5. ^ Near, Thomas J.; Dornburg, Alex; Tokita, Masayoshi; Suzuki, Dai; Brandley, Matthew C.; Friedman, Matt (April 2014). "Boom and Bust: Ancient and Recent Diversification in Bichirs (Polypteridae: Actinopterygii), A Relictual Lineage of Ray-Finned Fishes". Evolution. 68 (4): 1014–1026. doi:10.1111/evo.12323. PMID 24274466. S2CID 8026535.
  6. ^ Giles, Sam; Xu, Guang-Hui; Near, Thomas J.; Friedman, Matt (2017-09-14). "Early members of 'living fossil' lineage imply later origin of modern ray-finned fishes". Nature. 549 (7671): 265–268. doi:10.1038/nature23654. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 28854173. S2CID 205259531.
  7. ^ Bakaev, A. S.; Kogan, I. (2022). "Squamation of the Permian actinopterygian Toyemia Minich, 1990: evenkiid (Scanilepiformes) affinities and implications for the origin of polypteroid scales". www.geology.cz. Retrieved 2024-02-28.