Thursday 11 February 2016

Fossil discovery: Extraordinary 'big-mouthed' fish from Cretaceous Period

February 8, 2016

An international team of scientists have discovered two new plankton-eating fossil fish species of the genus called Rhinconichthys (Rink-O-nik-thees) from the oceans of the Cretaceous Period, about 92 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet.

One of the authors of the study, Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University, said Rhinconichthys are exceptionally rare, known previously by only one species from England. But a new skull from North America, discovered in Colorado along with the re-examination of another skull from Japan have tripled the number of species in the genus with a greatly expanded geographical range. According to Shimada, who played a key role in the study, these species have been named R. purgatoirensis and R. uyenoi, respectively.

"I was in a team that named Rhinconichthysin 2010, which was based on a single species from England, but we had no idea back then that the genus was so diverse and so globally distributed," said Shimada.

The new study, "Highly specialized suspension-feeding bony fish Rhinconichthys (Actinopterygii: Pachycormiformes) from the mid-Cretaceous of the United States, England and Japan," will appear in the forthcoming issue of the international scientific journal Cretaceous Research.

The research team includes scientists from government, museum, private sector and university careers. They include Bruce A. Schumacher from the United Sates Forest Service who discovered the new specimen. It also includes researchers, Jeff Liston from the National Museum of Scotland and Anthony Maltese from the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center.

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