Long before whales dominated the oceans, Earth’s seas were home to a fish so massive it continues to challenge our ...

During these waves of mass extinction, most vertebrate survivors were confined to refugia, or isolated biodiversity hotspots ...

A study published in the Nature journal alters how the evolution of fish has been historically understood. Fossilized fish and other sea creatures have often been pivotal in new scientific discoveries ...

Reef fish evolved the ability to feed by biting prey from surfaces relatively recently, a UC Davis study shows. The innovation has driven an explosion of evolution in reef fish. Image shows a rainbow ...

Along the murky bottom of the Amazon River, serpentine fish called electric eels scour the gloom for unwary frogs or other small prey. When one swims by, the fish unleash two 600-volt pulses of ...

Cichlid fishes, renowned for their extraordinary speciation and adaptive radiation, provide an exceptional framework to explore evolutionary dynamics, particularly through the study of their parasites ...

While prospecting in the barren fjords of Arctic Canada, a trio of paleontologists struck the evolutionary equivalent of gold. They uncovered three specimens of a 383-million-year-old creature midway ...

The deep sea, covering approximately 65% of Earth's surface, has long been considered a biological desert. In this extreme environment—particularly in the hadal zone at depths greater than 6,000 ...

A trade-off between tooth size and jaw mobility has restricted fish evolution, Nick Peoples at the University of California Davis, US, and colleagues report in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

Africa’s deepest freshwater lake holds a dizzying array of animals, including hundreds of species of cichlid fish found nowhere else in the world. They crowd the waters of Lake Tanganyika, with scales ...

Parental egg-care in fish traps them in an evolutionary dead-end through the loss of the chorion-hardening system, according to scientists from the Institute of Science Tokyo. Fish have diverse ...