Researchers studying the skull of a 409 - million - class - old Pisces let out that this lobe - finned predatory animal is intimately relate to coelacanths , a rare fish that ’s alive today but declining . The findings , published inScience Advanceslast hebdomad , will facilitate research worker understand the ancestry of the first brute to walk on dry land .
Lobed - finned fishes like coelacanth and lungfish are more closely related to amphibians , reptiles , and mammal than they are to ray - finned fish , which let in Pisces the Fishes we usually remember about ( like salmon or clownfish ) . coelacanth and lungfish are two of the major mathematical group of animate being that make up the class called sarcopterygians . The other major group of living sarcopterygians is the tetrapod – all four - limbed terrestrial animals , include those who lost their limbs and those who ’ve returned to a life at sea . Modern , or “ crown ” , sarcopterygians are very unlike from stem sarcopterygians , which include gnarled animate being likePsarolepis . But because transitional species are rarefied , the origins of the crown group are a closed book .
There is , however , an oracular group of fish called onychodonts that may possess characteristics of both stem and top sarcopterygians . They drown the Devonian seas some 400 million long time ago with their protruding fins – which contain brawniness and bones that finally helped animals adapt to life sentence on land . The well - ossified skull ofQingmendous , an onychodont from China , was discovered just a few year ago . Up until then , the only fossil specimen of this extinct mintage had poorly rigidify braincases .
Using high - resolution CT scanning , a team led by Jing Lu and Min Zhu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences imaged the internal structures of theQingmendousbraincase and then reconstructed a virtual cranial endocast . Qingmenodus , they get a line , bridge over the morphologic break between stem sarcopterygians and coelacanths : It has similarities with shank sarcopterygians in one part of the braincase and exhibits coelacanth - like neurocranial features in another .
