Roughly 425 million years ago, in the warm seas over what is now southern China, there lived a meter-long bony fish with jaws full of clusters of spiky teeth.
Long extinct, this predatory fish (Megamastax amblyodus) was an ancient forerunner of all animals with a skeleton and a backbone alive today — including you and me — and was the world’s oldest known vertebrate apex predator that lived at the top of the food chain in its environment.
In a new paper published in Nature, we report the discovery of a remarkable new fossil of this strange creature.
This fossil gives us an unprecedented view into the early evolution of bony fishes, and fills a key gap in our understanding of the evolution of vertebrate diversity seen on Earth today.
The dawn of bony fishes
Bony fish are known as osteichthyans. They make up around 98% of all vertebrate species on Earth.
By the end of the Silurian Period (419.2 million years ago), the osteichthyans had branched into two main lineages: the Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes) and Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fishes and limbed tetrapods, including humans).
Until recently, our knowledge of the very earliest bony fishes (stem-osteichthyans) that branched off before that great split was restricted to tantalising fragments from Silurian and Early Devonian rocks, giving only the briefest glimpse into their bizarre anatomy.
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