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Fishes

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Abstract

Fishes make up the most abundant class of vertebrates, both in terms of numbers of species and of individuals. They exhibit enormous diversity in size, shape, biology, and in the habitats they occupy. They are also the least known of vertebrates. It is clear, however, that the group of animals popularly termed fishes is defined by the retention of primitive vertebrate features (aquatic, gills, fins,’ cold blooded’) and the extant groups include several rather distantly-related evolutionary lineages. The first jawed vertebrates, around 500 million years ago, were fishes, and the first tetrapod land vertebrates arose from among the fishes around 400 million years ago.

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Authors
  1. Brian Groombridge
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Groombridge, B. (1992). Fishes. In: Groombridge, B. (eds) Global Biodiversity. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2282-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2282-5_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5012-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-2282-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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