A trade-off between tooth size and jaw mobility has restricted fish evolution, Nick Peoples at the University of California ...

In 2015, two members of the Blue Beach Fossil Museum in Nova Scotia found a long, curved fossil jaw, bristling with teeth.

Ray-finned fish, now the most diverse group of backboned animals, were not as hard hit by a mass extinction event 360 million years ago as scientists previously thought.

The species was named Sphyragnathus tyche, combining Greek words “sphyra,” meaning hammer and “gnathus,” meaning jaw for the ...

C. wildi was an early ray-finned fish – possessing a backbone and fins supported by bony rods called “rays” – that is thought to have been 6 to 8 inches long, swum in an estuary, and ate ...

Early ray-finned fishes like Coccocephalus can tell scientists about the initial evolutionary phases of today's most diverse fish group, which includes everything from trout to tuna, seahorses to ...

The fossilized skull of Coccocephalus wildi, an early ray-finned fish that swam in an estuary 319 million years ago. The fish is facing to the right, with the jaws visible in the lower right ...

In comparison, most early ray-finned fish would have been around 10 inches. At that size, the fish could have been a top predator in this coastal lake, Lucas said. To this day, Harris says it's ...

C. wildi lacks this hallmark feature of ray-finned fish, with the configuration of a part of its forebrain called the “telencephalon” more closely resembling that of other vertebrates, such as ...