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In practice, fish anatomy and fish physiology complement each other, the former dealing with the structure of a fish, its organs or component parts and how they are put together, such as might be observed on the dissecting table or under the microscope, and the latter dealing with how those components function together in living fish. The ...
Osteichthyes (/ ˌ ɒ s t iː ˈ ɪ k θ iː z / ost-ee-IK-theez; from Ancient Greek ὀστέον (ostéon) 'bone' and ἰχθύς (ikhthús) 'fish'), [2] also known as osteichthyans or commonly referred to as the bony fish, is a diverse clade of vertebrate animals that have endoskeletons primarily composed of bone tissue.
Fish bone is any bony tissue in a fish, although in common usage the term refers specifically to delicate parts of the non-vertebral skeleton of such as ribs, fin spines and intramuscular bones. Not all fish have fish bones in this sense; for instance, eels and anglerfish do not possess bones other than the cranium and the vertebrae.
Bony fish can be further divided into those with lobe fins and those with ray fins. Lobe fins have the form of fleshy lobes supported by bony stalks which extend from the body. [ 16 ] Lobe fins evolved into the legs of the first tetrapod land vertebrates, so by extension an early ancestor of humans was a lobe-finned fish.
Until recently, the view of most ichthyologists has been that Osteichthyes were paraphyletic and include only bony fishes. [8] However, since 2013 widely cited ichthyology papers have been published with phylogenetic trees that treat the Osteichthyes as a clade including tetrapods, making the terms Euteleostomi and Osteichthyes synonymous.
Branchial arches or gill arches are a series of paired bony/cartilaginous "loops" behind the throat (pharyngeal cavity) of fish, which support the fish gills. As chordates, all vertebrate embryos develop pharyngeal arches, though the eventual fate of these arches varies between taxa.
The cladogram below shows the evolutionary relationships of the teleosts to other extant clades of bony fish, [15] and to the four-limbed vertebrates that evolved from a related group of bony fish during the Devonian period. [17] [18] Approximate divergence dates (in millions of years, mya) are from Near et al., 2012. [15]
The cleithrum (pl.: cleithra) is a membrane bone which first appears as part of the skeleton in primitive bony fish, where it runs vertically along the scapula. [1] Its name is derived from Greek κλειθρον = " key (lock) ", by analogy with " clavicle " from Latin clavicula = "little key".