It wasn’t an historic boomerang. It was, in reality, a fish — albeit not like any identified at this time. Past that, no one’s fairly certain what to make of Pegasus volans.
The fish’s ribbonlike physique, identified from two fossils from a 50-million-year-old website in northern Italy, has thwarted efforts to pinpoint the animal’s place on the tree of life for greater than two centuries. In a brand new evaluation posted August 23 on bioRxiv.org, a pair of researchers says even essentially the most outstanding concepts thus far are incorrect — sufficient so to rename the extinct animal.
“We all know what it isn’t,” says Donald Davesne, a paleontologist on the Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past in Paris, “however it’s unclear what it could possibly be.”
The creature has shared the genus title Pegasus with seamoths — flat, armored snout-nosed fish — since Italian naturalist Giovanni Serafino Volta first described it in 1796. “They don’t have anything in frequent,” Davesne says. “I don’t know what this man was pondering.”
Davesne and paleontologist Giorgio Carnevale of the College of Turin in Italy examined the fossilized fish, every not than six centimeters, utilizing a stereomicroscope and images taken below ultraviolet gentle. Based mostly on the specimens’ skeletal anatomy and fin dimension, the duo additionally dominated out a detailed kinship with oarfish, as some paleontologists had just lately advised.
As a substitute, Davesne and Carnevale be aware similarities to the larvae of contemporary cusk-eels and different fishes within the group Teleostei, together with a protracted dorsal-fin ray that prolonged above the top (SN: 5/1/15). The fish’s tiny stomach suggests its guts in all probability needed to dangle in a pouch beneath the physique, additionally like teleost larvae.
However the fossil fish themselves don’t look like larvae, the researchers say, as a consequence of their comparatively massive our bodies and absolutely ossified skeletons. Nonetheless, the fossils may symbolize an early look of those larval traits, maybe as a part of the explosion of spiny-rayed fish range after the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction roughly 66 million years in the past, Davesne says.
He cautions that confirming any relationship would require extra info — just like the tail finish of the fish, which is lacking from each fossils. “At some point, somebody will discover one other specimen that’s even higher preserved,” Davesne says. “That might be neat!”
With its household ties unclear, the duo says, the fish wants a brand new genus title. Following Carnevale’s naming behavior, Davesne has chosen a moniker in honor of a late musician he knew personally. It is going to be revealed as soon as the paper is formally revealed.
