In what feels like a bit of a flurry, three papers have been published this month.
First, Macroevolutionary role reversals in the earliest radiation of bony fishes, published in Current Biology led by Emily M. Troyer and Rafael A. Rivero-Vega, with contributions from Xindong Cui, Min Zhu, Tuo Qiao, Hadeel H. Saad, Rodrigo T. Figueroa, James V. Andrews, Alice M. Clement (that’s me!), Oleg A. Lebedev, Robert Higgins, Benjamin Igielman, Stephanie E. Pierce, Sam Giles, and Matt Friedman.
This is a really impressive paper that examines jaw shape in 86 species of Palaeozoic bony fish, and found that in stark contrast to their depauperate disparity today, lungfish and coelacanths had especially diverse, rapidly evolving jaws early on in their history. And, as a further inversion of modern-day patterns, the early ray-finned fishes had low disparity and slow rates of jaw evolution. I love just how “out there” lungfish (Dipnoi, in orange below) were!
Figure from Troyer et al. (2025) Current Biology.
Next, New specimens of the arthrodire Bullerichthys fascidens Dennis and Miles 1980 show incipient site-specific osteichthyan-like tooth addition and resorption, was published in the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology a week ago. This work was led by Kate Trinajstic, with input from co-authors Zerina Johanson, Carole Burrow, Moya Meredith Smith, John Long, Alice Clement, Brian Choo, Anton Maksimenko & Vincent Dupret.
This paper shows that the ability to reshape and shed their dentition can be traced as far back as our distant placoderm ancestors, using evidence from some really well preserved material of a fish called Bullerichthys from the Devonian-age Gogo Formation that we imaged using powerful synchrotron light to reveal the microstructure within their teeth.
Lastly, a really cool palaeoecological study was published this week, entitled Trait-space disparity in fish communities spanning 380 million years from the Late Devonian to present, published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.
This one was another big group effort, led by John Llewelyn, with input from John A. Long, Richard Cloutier, Alice M. Clement, Giovanni Strona, Frédérik Saltré, Michael S.Y. Lee, Brian Choo, Kate Trinajstic, Olivia Vanhaesebroucke, Austin Fitzpatrick and Corey J.A. Bradshaw.
In it we compared diversity of various fish traits (such as mouth position, tail shape and so on) through space and time by comparing three Late Devonian fish communities, which included a tropical reef (Gogo, Australia), a tropical estuary (Miguasha, Canada), and a temperate freshwater system (Canowindra, Australia), compared against six modern communities from diverse habitats. By doing so we could show that Devonian and modern fish communities differ in trait composition, but that habitat and climate patterns are consistent across at least 380 million years of evolution!
Dr Alice Clement 