text: Just yesterday, my newest paper was published online in the journal The Science of Nature: Naturwissenschaften about a rather unusual fish from the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation of southeastern Utah. The fish, Hemicalypterus weiri, was a deep-bodied, disc-shaped fish, with enameled ganoid scales covering the anterior portion of its flank, and a scaleless posterior half, which presumably aided in flexibility while swimming. Although Hemicalypterus was first described in the 1960s (Schaeffer, 1967), recent collecting trips recovered many new specimens of Hemicalypterus, and I decided to reinvestigate this enigmatic fish as part of my dissertation research.
  While cleaning specimens of Hemicalypterus at the University of Kansas Vertebrate Paleontology prep lab, I noticed rather unusual teeth on the lower jaw that I had exposed from the rock matrix. These teeth look like a mouthful of little forks, and there were at least six individual teeth on the lower jaw. As I prepared other specimens, I found that these teeth were also on the premaxillae. Each tooth has a long cylindrical base and a flattened, spatulate edge with four delicate, individual cusps. I hadn't seen anything like this before in other fossil fishes, and so I started searching the literature and talking to other ichthyologists.
  The multidenticulate teeth on the premaxilla of one of the specimens
  Well, as it turns out, this tooth morphology has evolved multiple times in several independent lineages of teleost fishes, and quite often fishes with similar dentition scrape algae off of a hard substrate. These teeth indeed act like little forks (or "sporks" might be more appropriate) for these herbivorous/omnivorous fishes. Examples of extant fishes with similar teeth include freshwater forms such as the algae-scraping cichlids and characiforms, as well as many marine forms that are key in controlling algae growth in coral reef environments, such as acanthurids (surgeonfishes, tangs) and siganids (rabbitfishes). Of course, these modern-day fishes also feed on other things (e.g., phytoplankton), but algae is often the primary staple, and these fishes use this specialized dentition for a specific feeding behavior.
  The same teeth as above, but under fluorescent lighting
  So while it is impossible to prove definitively what a species of fish that lived over 200 million years ago fed upon (without gut contents being preserved....or a time machine), it is still safe to infer that Hemicalypterus occupied an ecological niche space similar to algae-scraping cichlids or other modern-day herbivorous fishes and may have scraped algae off of a hard substrate, based on this unusual tooth morphology and its similarity to modern forms.
  The multidenticulate teeth of a modern-day algae-scraping cichlid, Labeotropheus
  This discovery also extends evidence of herbivory in fishes clear back to the Early Mesozoic, whereas prior to this discovery it was assumed that herbivory evolved in the Middle Cenozoic in marine teleost fishes. Frankly, there was no evidence to say otherwise, as most Mesozoic fishes have general caniniform or styliform (peg-like) teeth, or they have heavy crushing or pavement-like teeth consistent with crushing hard-shelled organisms. The teeth of Hemicalypterus are very delicate, and wouldn't really do well with durophagy. This is the first potential evidence of herbivory in the Mesozoic, and in a non-teleost, ray-finned fish.
  Original Source: Gibson, S.Z. 2015. Evidence of a specialized feeding niche in a Late Triassic ray-finned fish: evolution of multidenticulate teeth and benthic scraping in †Hemicalypterus. The Science of Nature — Naturwissenschaften 102:10.
  Also cited: Schaeffer, B. 1967. Late Triassic fishes from the western United States. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 135: 289–342.
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  A. Townsend Peterson administration Andrew Short antarctica2014 Caroline Chaboo Chris Beard entomology fossil grant Herpetology herps ichthyology identification informatics invert-paleo Leonard Krishtalka Leo Smith museum Natural History Museum ornithology paleobotany Paul Selden Philippines Philippines 2009 Philippines 2010 Philippines 2012 Rafe Brown research ssar2015 vertebrate-paleontology
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  Wednesday, October 15, 2014
  Sarah Gibson
  Behind the Research: Identifying a New Species of Fossil Fish
  A fundamental part of being a scientist is publishing your research. Scientists ask questions, formulate hypotheses, rigorously test these hypotheses, and publish their research and their results. Other people can then read these results and build off of these studies, either to question or refute the findings, or to use the findings to ask other questions. It is how science grows and evolves.
  What almost all scientific publications lack, however, is the flair, the backstory, and general behind-the-scenes action that is part of everyday research. Scientific publications are whittled down to the most concentrated version, filled with the jargon of the discipline, and stripped of any extraneous behind-the-scenes anecdotes. So while any given scientific paper can be exciting to a scientist who wants to learn more about the organism or the methods addressed, they can be a bit unfriendly to a general reader.
  So for fun, I have decided to tell some behind-the-scenes stories of the research I do, in the context of my published papers. Hopefully I give you a sense of what it is really like to be a paleontologist, and the work that is involved.
  I’ll begin with my two solo-authored papers that I published in 2013. The papers can be found here and here, and if you cannot access those journals, please contact me at szgibson@ku.edu and I will send you a PDF.
  These two papers establish a new genus and two new species of fishes within a group called semionotiforms. Semionotiforms are an extinct group of fishes, but are closely related to living gar, and like gar, their bodies were covered with thick enamel scales (ganoid scales). Semionotiforms are found in geologic deposits worldwide, and range in age from Middle Triassic (~237 million years ago) to Early Cretaceous (~145 million years ago). A lot of variety occurs in semionotiforms in the shape of the body, the characteristics of the skull, the teeth, etc., and part of my research is to figure out what makes these particular fishes different from other species that have been described in the literature by other scientists. So you could say that my hypothesis for these studies is that these fishes represent new species, and I am testing that hypothesis by comparing the anatomy and morphology of these fishes to other semionotiform fishes to see if my hypothesis is correct or incorrect.
  Some of the fossil specimens I work on are from museum collections, such as the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the Smithsonian and were collected in the 1950s and 1960s, yet remained in these collections unstudied and undescribed for decades. I began working on these fishes in 2006, when I worked at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site (SGDS) as an undergraduate student intern and later as the prep lab and collections manager. The crew of staff and volunteers from SGDS had just gone out to a site in southeastern Utah and collected hundreds of fossils (outlined in Milner et al., 2006), but most of these fishes were not identified. So as I started cleaning the fossils (fossil prep—to be discussed in a later blog!), I started looking for characteristics that defined them as either new or belonging to a described species of semionotiform fish. While I worked on the new specimens, I looked at older literature, in particular a (1967) paper by an AMNH paleontologist Bobb Schaeffer, who mentioned collecting many semionotiforms from the same area but didn't describe them or give them names. So, in 2008, I went to the collections of the AMNH to look at those old specimens collected decades before and reexamined them, seeing which of them could be the same species as the new specimens the SGDS crew had just collected. I identified at least two different species, though there are likely more than that.
  Now, identifying a new species is more than just a “Eureka!” moment. A scientist cannot know what is new unless he/she knows what already exists, and so scientists have to be very familiar with other scientists’ work in the field. An inordinate amount of any scientist’s time is spent reading books and papers, and I spent months pouring over scientific literature, some as old as 1820, to find the characteristics of other semionotiforms. As I looked at each bone on the fossil fishes from the AMNH and those newly collected from SGDS, I compared it to the same bones in other semionotiform fishes, and I had to look for similarities and differences. Eventually, I found a suite of anatomical and morphological characters that distinguished these fishes from all other semionotiform fishes, and I had enough to publish two papers on two distinct species. In these papers, I had to give an exhaustively detailed description of every single bone, and I mean EVERY bone (these fishes have hundreds of bones, dozens in their skull alone!) that I could see on the specimens, because other scientists, when trying to identify new species of their own, may turn to my work for comparison, and so my papers have to be provide as much anatomical detail as possible!
  Next time….naming a new species!!
  References
  Gibson, S.Z. 2013a. A new hump-backed ginglymodian fish (Neopterygii, Semionotiformes) from the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation of southeastern Utah. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 33: 1037–1050.
  Gibson, S.Z. 2013b. Biodiversity and evolutionary history of †Lophionotus (Neopterygii: †Semionotiformes) from the western United States. Copeia 2013: 582–603.
  Milner, A.R.C., Mickelson, D.L., Kirkland, J.I., and Harris, J.D. 2006. Reinvestigation of Late Triassic fish sites in the Chinle Group, San Juan County, Utah: new discoveries. In: A Century of Research at Petrified Forest National Park: Geology and Paleontology (Eds. Parker, W.G., Ash, S.R., and Irmis, R.B.). Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 62: 163–165.
  Schaeffer, B. 1967. Late Triassic fishes from the western United States. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 135: 289–342.
  Tags:
  Triassic
  fish
  fossils
  vertebrate-paleontology
  semionotiform
  Chinle Formation
  Tag Cloud:
  A. Townsend Peterson administration Andrew Short antarctica2014 Caroline Chaboo Chris Beard entomology fossil grant Herpetology herps ichthyology identification informatics invert-paleo Leonard Krishtalka Leo Smith museum Natural History Museum ornithology paleobotany Paul Selden Philippines Philippines 2009 Philippines 2010 Philippines 2012 Rafe Brown research ssar2015 vertebrate-paleontology
  More
  Biodiversity Blogs
  Field Expedition Featured In Local Solomon Island Newspaper
  Field Safety
  Hiking around McMurdo
  Discoveries in Curio Bay
  Undergraduates and Impressive Snakes
  Return from the Solomon Islands
  Frozen Dinner
  Scientists in Red
  Getting from Here to There
  Preparing for weeks at -30F
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