Recently, Xu Guanghui, a researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his graduate students Ma Xinying and Ren Yi published the latest research results of Triassic fish in Guizhou, Yunnan, in the American journal PeerJ. The paper describes in detail a new artichial fish that symbiotics with Guizhou dragons and names it Wang's Fuyuan fish. This is the first discovery of fossils of arterial fish in the Triassic Latin Period strata of China.
As early as 1957, Hu Chengzhi of the Geological Museum of China went from Yunnan to Guizhou on a field geological expedition and found a fossil of a marine reptile in a small mountain village called Luyin Village in Dingxiao Town, Xingyi City. In 1958, after the study of Yang Zhongjian of the Institute of Ancient Spine, it was named Hu's Guizhou Dragon. In the following sixty years, a large number of marine reptile fossils were collected in this area, and many fish fossils were found. In addition to vertebrates, there are also invertebrates such as arthropods, ammonites, and bivalves. Researchers refer to them collectively as the Guizhou Dragon Fauna or the Xingyi Biota. Biostratigraphic studies have identified the Guizhou dragon fauna as the Middle Triassic Latin Period, and the absolute age is determined to be about 240 million years ago. The Guizhou dragon fauna is widely distributed at the junction of Yunnan and Guizhou, and has been found in Xingyi, Anlong, Fuyuan and Luoping in Guizhou. The reaming fish named by Xu Guanghui's research group is mainly based on 22 complete fossil specimens, most of which were found in the Eighteen Lian Mountains of Fuyuan, Yunnan, so the genus name is set as Fuyuan fish according to the place name. The species name was dedicated to Mr. Wang Kuan for donating two exquisite fish fossils from his personal collection to the Ancient Spine Institute.
The discovery of Wang's Fuyuan fish makes up for the lack of fossil records of Triassic Latin period articulated fish in China, and provides more information for studying the skeletal morphology and ecology of early reamer fish. The gar eels, which live in the freshwater environments of Central And North America and Cuba, are known as living fossils and are the living representatives of the reamerfish. As an important branch of whole bone fish, the reaming fish began to develop rapidly in the Triassic period, and its earliest fossil record comes from the Luoping and Panxian biota in the early Middle Triassic (Anni period), represented by the Gezin humpback fish and the Seuge's St. George's fish. The Xingyi Asian scaly fish was previously classified as a reamer fish, but according to the latest research by Xu Guanghui's research group, it belongs to another branch of all-bone fish, nearly herring. Wang's Fuyuan fish has typical reaming fish characteristics, such as two suborbital bones in front of the orbit, the lower jaw is relatively short, and the dorsal ridge scales in front of the dorsal fin have obvious spikes; at the same time, it has a laryngeal plate bone, the maxilla is short and toothless, and the auxiliary maxilla and superior orbital bone are missing, which distinguish it from other articulated fish, and the results of branch systematics show that it and the Grignard bowback fish form a sister group relationship, which is located at the base of the reamed fish. The Wang's Fuyuan fish is small and one of the smallest whole-bone fish. Its findings further support the hypothesis that the overall size of the reamer fish was smaller than that of the near-herring in the Triassic marine environment of South China.
The research has been funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Strategic Pioneering Science and Technology Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Frontier Science Key Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Special Project for the Excavation and Repair of Paleontological Fossils.
Figure 1: Orthotype specimen and restoration of Wang's Fuyuan fish (courtesy of Xu Guanghui)
Fig. 2: Another complete specimen of Wang's Fuyuan fish (courtesy of Xu Guanghui)