Evolutionary History of Fishes

A special issue of Diversity (ISSN 1424-2818). This special issue belongs to the section "Animal Diversity".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2025 | Viewed by 1265

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lake Campus, Wright State University, Celina, OH 45822-2921, USA
Interests: fossils; phylogeny; palaeoecology; vertebrate paleontology; ecology and evolution; macroevolution; morphometrics; functional morphology; morphological analysis
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Guest Editor
Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati, OH 45203, USA
Interests: stratigraphy; sedimentology; sequence stratigraphy; sedimentary basins; marine geology; field geology; geological mapping; sediments; palaeoecology; quaternary geology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Fishes, which include all aquatic, non-tetrapod vertebrates, have had a major impact on the emergence and evolution of organisms and ecosystems across the vast majority of the Phanerozoic Eon. The first true craniate organism that could reasonably be called a fish (in a non-cladistic sense) appeared during the first period of the Paleozoic Era. This first appearance was rapidly followed by an evolutionary expansion that led to the wide diversity of extant and extinct fish groups by the end of the Paleozoic Era and beyond. Fishes are the most numerous and most diverse of all vertebrate groups. Many fish taxa serve as model organisms today, and the relationship humans have with fishes, in general, is likely as long-standing as the relationship of humans with aquatic environments themselves.

In this Special Issue, we will take an opportunity to highlight and promote new research on the evolutionary history of fishes. We think that it is important to examine fishes as a group as well as an individual taxon from the perspectives of their paleo-ecology, their diversity across time and space, the taphonomy of fossils in well-preserved konservat lagerstatten or high-volume deposits (bone beds), their relationships to one another, and their evolution in both the narrow and the broad sense. We invite manuscripts that focus on these issues with the goal of creating a platform from which future research can be built upon and can advance our knowledge of these topics that apply to such fundamentally significant vertebrates.

Prof. Dr. Charles Ciampaglio
Dr. Ryan C. Shell
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • evolutionary history
  • fishes
  • paleo-ecology
  • diversity
  • relationships
  • evolution

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Review

20 pages, 1200 KiB  
Review
An Overview of Post-Fertilization Parental Care in Gobiidae
by Miguel Trujillo-García, Bertha Patricia Ceballos-Vázquez, Palestina Guevara-Fiore and Hope Klug
Diversity 2025, 17(7), 446; https://doi.org/10.3390/d17070446 - 24 Jun 2025
Viewed by 979
Abstract
Parental care increases offspring survival but is typically costly to the parent providing it. Understanding diversity in parental care across animals is a timely topic in evolutionary ecology. Fishes are particularly well suited for studies aimed at understanding the diversity of parental care [...] Read more.
Parental care increases offspring survival but is typically costly to the parent providing it. Understanding diversity in parental care across animals is a timely topic in evolutionary ecology. Fishes are particularly well suited for studies aimed at understanding the diversity of parental care because parental care in fishes is highly variable across species. In most fish species, no care is provided. When parental care is provided, it is often paternal, although biparental and maternal care occur in some fish species as well. Parental care in fishes ranges from simple guarding of eggs in a territory to prolonged care of young after hatching. Within fishes, gobies are thought to exhibit diverse parental care. In the current manuscript, we begin to synthesize our knowledge of patterns of parental care in gobies by providing a review of the parental care strategies that are exhibited by gobiid species. Our review reveals that parental care in gobies most often includes guarding, fanning, and cleaning, although some species engage in other types of care such as larval release, the production of antimicrobial substances, and the construction of post-mating mounds. Care in gobies is most often paternal, but maternal and biparental care have been documented in some species. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Evolutionary History of Fishes)
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