Ancient And Relict Fish (Coelacanth, Lungfish)

This group gathers Fish subcategory members belonging to lineages that diverged from the rest of the bony fish extremely early, several of them survivors of body plans and evolutionary experiments otherwise known mainly from the fossil record. It spans the coelacanth, once known only as a fossil and believed extinct for some 66 million years until a living specimen was caught off South Africa in 1938, the lungfish, which like the coelacanth are closer relatives of the four-limbed land vertebrates than of most other living fish and can breathe air directly, the bichirs, primitive ray-finned fish with lobed, paddle-like fins and a row of separate dorsal finlets, the sturgeon and paddlefish, ancient, mostly scaleless fish that have changed little in body plan for over a hundred million years, the gar and bowfin, North America's own living fossils, the jawless lampreys and hagfish, whose entire body plan predates the evolution of jaws, the bonytongue Arapaima, and the extinct Guiyu oneiros, among the earliest known bony fish ever discovered as a complete fossil.