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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