Bony Rhinconichthys goes global.

PositionCretaceous Period - Brief article

Two new plankton-eating fossil fish species of the genus Rhinconichthys (Rink-o-nik-thees) from the oceans of the Cretaceous Period--about 92,000,000 years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet--have been discovered by an international team of scientists.

Study coauthor Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University, Chicago, Ill., says Rhinconichthys are exceptionally rare, known previously by only one species from England, but a new skull from North America, discovered in Colorado, along with the reexamination of another skull from Japan, have tripled the number of species in the genus with a greatly expanded geographical range. These species have been named R. purgatoirensis and R. uyenoi, respectively.

"I was in a team that named Rhinconichthys in 2010, which was based on a single species from England, but we had no idea back then that the genus was so diverse and so globally distributed," reveals Shimada.

Rhinconichthys belongs to an extinct bony fish group called pachycormids, which contains the largest bony fish ever to have...

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