August 17, 2017
Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and colleagues compared fossil porcupine fish jaws and tooth plates collected on expeditions to Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil with those from museum specimens and modern porcupine fish, revealing three new species.
Startled porcupine fish suck in air or water to inflate their bodies, becoming a prickly balloon-like shape to defend themselves from predators and some contain a neurotoxin a thousand times more potent than cyanide in their ovaries and livers. They are also good at offense, crushing the shells of clams and other marine mollusks with beak-like jaws so tough that they are preserved as fossils to be discovered millions of years later.
Two of the newly discovered species, named Chilomycterus tyleri, in honor of the Smithsonian's James C. Tyler, senior scientist emeritus at the National Museum of Natural History—an expert on this group of fish—and C. expectatus, named for the arrangement of its dental plates, were discovered in Panama's Gatun formation.
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