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A fish (pl.: fish or fishes) is an aquatic, anamniotic, gill-bearing vertebrate animal with swimming fins and a hard skull, but lacking limbs with digits.Fish can be grouped into the more basal jawless fish and the more common jawed fish, the latter including all living cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as the extinct placoderms and acanthodians.
The anatomy of fish is often shaped by the physical characteristics of water, the medium in which fish live. Water is much denser than fish, holds a relatively small amount of dissolved oxygen, and absorbs more light than air does. The body of a fish is divided into a head, trunk and tail, although the divisions between the three are not always ...
The evolution of fish began about 530 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion. It was during this time that the early chordates developed the skull and the vertebral column, leading to the first craniates and vertebrates. The first fish lineages belong to the Agnatha, or jawless fish. Early examples include Haikouichthys.
Actinopterygii (ray-finned fish) Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish, including tetrapods) Osteichthyes (/ ˌɒstiːˈɪkθiːz / ost-ee-IK-theez), [ 2 ] also known as osteichthyans or commonly referred to as the bony fish, is a diverse superclass of vertebrate animals that have endoskeletons primarily composed of bone tissue.
Chondrichthyes (/ kɒnˈdrɪkθiiːz /; from Ancient Greek χόνδρος (khóndros) 'cartilage' and ἰχθύς (ikhthús) 'fish') is a class of jawed fish that contains the cartilaginous fish or chondrichthyans, which all have skeletons primarily composed of cartilage. They can be contrasted with the Osteichthyes or bony fish, which have ...
Taxonomy of fish. Fishes are a paraphyletic group and for this reason, the class Pisces seen in older reference works is no longer used in formal taxonomy. Traditional classification divides fish into three extant classes (Agnatha, Chondrichthyes, and Osteichthyes), and with extinct forms sometimes classified within those groups, sometimes as ...
Deep-sea fish. Deep-sea fish are fish that live in the darkness below the sunlit surface waters, that is below the epipelagic or photic zone of the sea. The lanternfish is, by far, the most common deep-sea fish. Other deep-sea fishes include the flashlight fish, cookiecutter shark, bristlemouths, anglerfish, viperfish, and some species of eelpout.
Ichthyology is the branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish, including bony fish (Osteichthyes), cartilaginous fish (Chondrichthyes), and jawless fish (Agnatha). According to FishBase, 33,400 species of fish had been described as of October 2016, with approximately 250 new species described each year. [1][citation needed]