Freshwater Fishes 250 Million Years of Evolutionary History

About this book

With more than 15,000 species, nearly a quarter of the total number of vertebrate species on Earth, freshwater fishes are extremely varied. They include the largest fish species, the beluga at over 7 meters long, and the smallest, the Paedocypris at just 8 millimeters, as well as the carnivorous, such as the piranha, and the calm, such as the Chinese algae eater. Certain species evolve rapidly, cichlids for example, while others transform very slowly, like lungfish. The fossils of these animals are very diverse in nature, sometimes just small scattered bones where sites correspond to ancient river beds or magnificent fossils of entire fish where there was once a lake.

Freshwater Fishes covers the history of these fishes over the last 250 million years by exploring the links between their biological evolution and the paleogeographic and environmental transformations of our planet, whether these be gradual or sudden.

Contents

1. Environments freshwater and freshwater fish
2. Environments and fauna Mesozoic and Cenozoic freshwater
3. Freshwater fish faunas of the Mesozoic
4. Freshwater fish faunas of the Cenozoic
5. Evolutionary history of freshwater fish
6. Evolutionary mechanisms in freshwater environments

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Biography

Lionel Cavin is a palaeontologist and curator at the Natural History Museum of Geneva in Switzerland. His research covers all aspects of the evolutionary history of Osteichthyes (bony fish), their anatomy, phylogenetics, paleobiogeography and paleoecology.