Shadow of the Palaeoniscoids

Palaeoniscum freieslebeni, copyright James St. John.

Depending how you cut it, the ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii) are arguably the most diverse group of vertebrates in the modern fauna. They are the dominant vertebrates in all aquatic environments, they encompass an enormous array of species, and they have evolved a bewildering assemblage of morphologies. But despite their current pre-eminence, the early evolution of actinopterygians remains rather understudied. The earliest actinopterygians appear in the fossil record in the Late Silurian/Early Devonian but, until fairly recently, the majority of Palaeozoic ray-finned fishes have often been lumped into a catch-all holding tank, the 'Palaeonisciformes'. This was a vague assemblage of fishes united by plesiomorphic features such as ganoid scales (heavy, bony scales with an outer layer of enamel, also found in modern gars and sturgeons), a single dorsal fin and a heterocercal tail (with the upper arm of the tail fin longer than the lower). The key genus of the group, the Permian Palaeoniscum, had a fusiform (or torpedo-shaped) body; at first glance, it would not have looked dissimilar to a modern herring. However, it lacked the mobile jaw structure of modern teleost fishes, with the maxilla and preopercular bones being fixed together. As such, it would have lacked the modern fish's capacity for suction feeding (Lauder 1980). Prey capture by Palaeoniscum would have been a simple smash-and-grab affair. Palaeoniscoid fishes remained a component of both marine and freshwater faunas until the end of the Cretaceous before being entirely supplanted by modern teleost radiations such as the ostariophysans and percomorphs.

Reconstruction of Acrolepis gigas, copyright DiBgd.

The core concept of 'Palaeonisciformes' has united fishes with a fusiform body shape like Palaeoniscum; depending on the author, more divergent contemporary fishes such as the deep-body platysomoids might be combined in the same order or treated separately. By modern standards, former 'Palaeonisciformes' probably combine stem-actinopterygians, stem-chondrosteans, stem-holosteans and possibly even stem-teleosts. As such, the term Palaeonisciformes has tended to fall out of favour, though the less formal 'palaeoniscoid' remains a useful descriptor. Nevertheless, the exact phylogenetic position of many palaeoniscoid taxa remains unestablished. Part of this is due to a lack of observable detail: though those heavy ganoid scales preserve well, they effectively cover up internal skeletal features. Many palaeoniscoids are preserved as compression fossils, effectively not much more than intriguing silhouettes. However, part of the problem is simple neglect. Palaeoniscoids are not rare fossils; in some formations, they may be the dominant part of the fauna by a large margin. They certainly deserve a closer look.

REFERENCE

Lauder, G. V., Jr. 1980. Evolution of the feeding mechanism in primitive actinopterygian fishes: a functional anatomical analysis of Polypterus, Lepisosteus, and Amia. Journal of Morphology 163: 283–317.

To Drop Jaw or Not?

The vast majority of living ray-finned fishes (that is, all of them except for bichirs, sturgeons and paddlefishes) fall under the auspices of the clade Neopterygii. I have commented on this clade in earlier posts and in those posts I have noted that modern neopterygians can theselves be divided between three basal lineages. By far the largest of these is the teleosts with only a handful of species representing the other two: the seven or so species of gar in the Lepisosteidae, and the phylogenetically isolated bowfin Amia calva. However, the exact relationships between these three lineages have been the subject of debate.

Close-up on bowfin Amia calva head, from Big Fishes of the World. Note the membranous attachment of the back of the upper jaw.

Historically, the bowfin and the gars were recognised as a group Holostei in apposition to the Teleostei. When first established, this division was motivated primarily by the nature of their scales: the heavy, solid scales of the holosteans contrasted with the thinner, lighter scales of the teleosts. Hence the name 'Holostei' meaning 'entirely bone': the holosteans have both a completely bony skeleton on the inside (as opposed to the partially cartilaginous skeletons of more basal fishes) and a complete covering of bony scales on the outside. However, the heavy scales of the Holostei are a primitive feature, indicating that the two lineages diverged before the evolution of the lighter teleost scales but not indicating a direct relationship with each other.

With the increasing emphasis on evolutionary relationships as the primary informer of classifications, a different system was proposed. This saw the gars as the most divergent lineage of the Neopterygii with the bowfin being united with the teleosts as a clade Halecostomi. This time, the primary evidence for this division was in how their jaws worked. The ancestral condition for vertebrate jaws has them working much as our own still do. The upper jaw, the maxilla, is largely fixed in place against the base of the neurocranium (the brain-holding bit) while the movement of opening and closing the mouth is achieved by the lower jaw, the mandible, pivoting around its hinge towards the back of the skull. In the bowfin and teleosts, however, the maxilla is hinged with the skull at its anterior end and with the mandible at the back. When the mouth opens, the maxila pivots downwards from this anterior hinge, dropping the mandible as a whole downwards. The bowfin and teleosts also possess a bone in the cheek, the interopercular bone, that is not found in other fishes; a muscle attached to this bone rotates the gill operculum as the mouth opens (Lauder 1980). Functionally, the expansion of the mouth cavity in this manner of opening the jaws creates a suction that pulls prey or other food into the fish's mouth.

Though it was by no means universally accepted, it is probably fair to say that the halecostomes vs gars picture of neopterygian evolution became the majority view. But then came the advent of molecular phylogenetic analysis, all ready and willing to cast the proverbial spanner. Rather than confirming halecostome monophyly, molecular analyses pointed the other way, back towards a clade of the bowfin and gars. Following this, a detailed study of gar systematics published by Grande (2010) also supported a gar plus bowfin monophylum on morphological grounds and resurrected the concept of Holostei (albeit redefined on phylogenetic grounds).

Skull of a longnose gar Lepisosteus osseus, from Grande (2010). In the lower diagram, the maxilla is labelled 'mx' and the lacrimomaxillaries are labelled 'lmx'.

Gar jaws, it should be noted at this point, are a bit weird. Rather than being primarily composed of a single maxilla on each side, the upper jaws are made up of a series of tooth-bearing bones, each bone carrying just a few teeth, that have been dubbed the lacrimomaxillaries. When the jaws open, as well as the lower jaw opening in the standard manner, the flexible upper jaw also bends upwards. Rather than using suction to draw in their food like other neopterygians, gars capture prey by sneaking up to it then using a quick sideways jerk of the head to bring the open jaws around the prey (Lauder 1980). Gars were excluded from the Halecostomi on the basis of their lack of a long, mobile maxilla but, as explained by Grande (2010), a mobile maxilla is indeed present in gars but reduced to a remnant splint at the back of the jaw (in mature alligator gars Atractosteus spatula, the maxilla does not ossify). In very young juvenile gars, the mobile maxilla remains a significant part of the upper jaw with the lacrimomaxillaries being added in front of it as the jaw lengthens. As for the interopercular, this is genuinely absent in modern gars but it is present in close fossil relatives of gars such as semionotids. Rather than retaining a primitive jaw structure that was superseded in the bowfin and teleosts, it appears that gars evolved their own derived jaw structure from 'halecostome' ancestors.

Given that suction-assisted feeding is generally regarded as a major advance in fish evolution, how did gars end up abandoning it? That I can only speculate about. Is it related to the evolution of their elongate rostra? Long beaks are certainly a thing for a number of teleosts, but I don't know if any have a beak as long and robust as a gar's. Could it be that the greater precision of gars' snapping mode of feeding is an advantage in the low-oxygen, muck-filled waters in which gars thrive? Or could it be a side effect somehow of gars' more heavily armoured condition than other early-diverging neopterygians?

It's only fair to note that monophyly of Holostei is still not universally accepted; there are sill researchers who are inclined to think the bowfin closer to teleosts. But even if the 'Halecostomi' hypothesis was to rise once more to the surface, it would not be for the same reasons it did before.

REFERENCES

Grande, L. 2010. An empirical synthetic pattern study of gars (Lepisosteiformes) and closely related species, based mostly on skeletal anatomy. The resurrection of Holostei. Copeia 2010 (2A): iii–x, 1–871.

Lauder, G. V., Jr. 1980. Evolution of the feeding mechanism in primitive actinopterygian fishes: a functional anatomical analysis of Polypterus, Lepisosteus, and Amia. Journal of Morphology 163: 283–317.

Gar!

Apart from the mostly terrestrial radiation of the tetrapods, the vast majority of today's bony-skeletoned fishes belong to the clade of the teleosts. Way back in the Triassic, the ancestors of this clade went through a process of modification of the jaw skeleton to make it more mobile and adroit in catching small prey, and this together with a tendency towards the lightening of the skeleton and the body's covering of bony scales marked the beginnings of what is now well over 25,000 species. But while they may pale in comparison to this phylogenetic behemoth, there are still non-teleost (and non-tetrapod) bony fishes out there if you look in the right places.

Alligator gar Atractosteus spatula, copyright Stan Shebs.

Most studies on fish phylogeny in the last decade or so have agreed that the living sister group of the teleosts is the Holostei, a clade including only eight living species. One of these is the bowfin Amia calva, an elongate, cylindrical-bodied fish with a long dorsal fin running most of the length of its back. The other seven sepecies belong to the gar genera Lepisosteus and Atractosteus, forming the family Lepisosteidae*. Gars are also elongate like the bowfin, albeit without the long dorsal fin, and have elongate, flattened jaws (tending to be narrower in Lepisosteus than Atractosteus). The tail fin in both bowfins and gars is rounded, not forked. Living holosteans are restricted to North America (including Central America and the Caribbean)** but fossils show them to have been more widespread in the past. They are mostly found in fresh water; some species may tolerate brackish or even salt water but they do not stay there permanently. Bowfins and gars are able to breathe air directly as well as through their gills (indeed, gars are reported to drown if prevented from coming to the surface for several hours) and can therefore survive in more stagnant waters than many other fish. The bowfin averages about half a metre in length; the smaller gar species are also in this range. The largest species, the alligator gar Atractosteus spatula, reaches at least close to three metres. Larger sizes (up to six metres or more!) have been reported for this species but appear likely to be errors or exaggerations; as noted by one authority, "All fishes shrink under the tape measure" (Grande 2010).

*The incorrect alternative spellings Lepidosteus and Lepidosteidae (as well as Lepidosteiformes) have often appeared in the past.

**References to a supposed Chinese gar have long persisted in the literature, based on a description of a "Lepidosteus sinensis" from 1873. This description was based on a drawing rather than an actual specimen, and it is now thought that the fish depicted was probably a belonid (an unrelated long-jawed teleost) rather than a gar.

Bowfin Amia calva sharing a tank with largemouth basses, copyright Bemep.

Modern holosteans are ambush predators, feeding on other fish or aquatic invertebrates. In general, larger species tend to prefer a diet of fish whereas smaller species focus on invertebrates, but all appear to be happy to take whatever they may, whether alive or dead. The alligator gar has been claimed to attack humans but no such attacks seem to have been authenticated; Grande (2010) stated that "swimmers probably have very little to fear from them". As well as their sheer size, this accusation may have been fueled by the alligator gar's apparent tendency in some areas to hang around wharves scavenging garbage. Neither bowfins nor gars are of high importance as food fish for humans though their size and strength gain them some attraction as sport fish*. An industry for the production and marketing of bowfin roe has arisen in recent years following the decline in availability of caviar from Russian sturgeon species; no such market exists for gar eggs, which are toxic to humans. Historically, the thick armour of scales covering the skin of gars was used by Caribbean Indians for making breastplates while individual scales could be used for arrowheads.

*Grande (2010) quotes Eberle (1990) to the effect that gars have "a poor reputation among anglers, who believe [they] would have been better suited as land dwellers had they been able to stand their own reflections in the water".

Shortnose gar Lepisosteus platostomus, copyright Rufus46.

Reproductive habits are best known in the bowfin and the longnose gar Lepisosteus osseus. Male bowfins construct a nest in mats of fibrous vegetation, into which they attempt to induce passing females to spawn. Guarding of the eggs after spawning is the duty of the male alone; the female moves on, perhaps to spawn in another male's nest (the male himself may also court more females). The eggs are adhesive and take about a week and a half to hatch. Following hatching, the fry attach themselves to nearby vegetation by an adhesive organ at the end of their snout and spend some time being nourished by the remains of their yolk sac beofre beginning to forage. The male will continue to guard his fry until they reach about a month of age. Reproduction in longnose gars is similar in the production of adhesive eggs and the early sessile, snout-attached period of the life cycle, but differs in that there is no nest construction or parental care. There is a record of gar eggs being deposited in the nest of a smallmouth bass and the fry being subsequently raised cuckoo-wise by the nest's owner, but it is unclear whether this reflects any deliberate action by the parental gars or simply a fortuitous accident. Gars take up to six years to reach maturity, with males maturing a couple of years earlier than females.

Semionotus bergeri, copyright Ghedoghedo.

The fossil record of holosteans extends back to their divergence from the teleosts in the early to mid-Triassic, with the bowfin and gar lineages apparently diverging from each other not long afterwards. As noted above, both lineages include a diversity of extinct members that somewhat belies their current paucity, such as Macrosemiidae and Semionotidae in the gar lineage, and Ophiopsidae, Ionoscopidae, Caturidae and Sinamiidae in the bowfin lineage. The greatest diversity in both lineages was during the Jurassic and Cretaceous (Brito & Alvarado-Ortega 2013; Cavin 2010) and the two modern gar genera appear to have been separate lineages at least since the late Cretaceous (Grande 2010). Holosteans were also more ecologically diverse in the past. Masillosteus, a gar genus from the Eocene of Europe and North America, had a shorter jaw and flatter teeth than modern jaws, and probably fed on harder-shelled animals such as molluscs and/or crustaceans. The Mesozoic 'Semionotidae', suggested by Cavin (2010) to be paraphyletic to the gars, were even more diverse, including marine as well as freshwater forms, and forms that may have plant feeders or detritivores. In the early Jurassic of eastern North America, one group of semionotids underwent a lake-based radiation that has been compared to the modern cichlids of African rift lakes. Adequately covering the diversity of fossil holosteans would make this post considerably longer than it already is; perhaps one day, I'll get to it.

REFERENCES

Brito, P. M. & J. Alvarado-Ortega. 2013. Cipatlichthys scutatus, gen. nov., sp. nov. a new halecomorph (Neopterygii, Holostei) from the Lower Cretaceous Tlayua Formation of Mexico. PLoS One 8 (9): e73551.

Cavin, L. 2010. Diversity of Mesozoic semionotiform fishes and the origin of gars (Lepisosteidae). Naturwissenschaften 97: 1035–1040.

Grande, L. 2010. An empirical synthetic pattern study of gars (Lepisosteiformes) and closely related species, based mostly on skeletal anatomy. The resurrection of Holostei. Copeia 2010 (2A): iii–x, 1–871.