Fishes have a great number of fins, which help them balance themselves and move around their environment. Some fish have fins that are highly specialised for certain tasks, for example the elongated and large pectoral fins of a flying fish allow them to glide and the pelvic fins of gobies tend to be fused together to form a suction disc!
Who would have thought fish had so many bones just in their skulls? Luckily I have Ragnar to keep me sane while I cry over bones and parts of bones and what they do
I cannot believe I didn't post this one here! Drawn last year, the biggest page of my fish anatomy and histology atlas.
Technically, transverse sections are more useful for looking at symmetry, so you can see if something is bilateral, but sagittal sections are just so cute! I love seeing a whole fish on a slide.
Scientist Accidentally Discovers The Oldest Brain of Any Vertebrate
Paleontologist Matt Friedman was surprised to discover a remarkably detailed 319-million-year-old fish brain fossil while testing out micro-CT scans for a broader project.
"It had all these features, and I said to myself, 'Is this really a brain that I'm looking at?'" says Friedman from University of Michigan.
"So, I zoomed in on that region of the skull to make a second, higher-resolution scan, and it was very clear that that's exactly what it had to be. And it was only because this was such an unambiguous example that we decided to take it further."
Usually, the only remaining traces of such ancient life are from more easily preserved hard parts of animals, like their bones, since soft tissues degrade quickly.
But in this case, a dense mineral, possibly pyrite, seeped in and replaced tissue that had likely been preserved for longer in a low-oxygen environment. This allowed scans to pick up what look like cranial nerve and soft tissue details of the small fish, Coccocephalus wildi....
The anal fin is a fin that's located on the underside of the body behind the anus, many fishes have this fin. Its main purpose is to stabilise the fish while it's swimming, but some fishes like the knifefishes use it exclusively for propulsion! Pufferfishes, sunfishes and boxfishes use the anal fin in tandem with the dorsal fin to swim.
If you want to help support me and get awesome stuff like early access/polls & pose requests Become A Patron / DA Subscriber or you can check out my Ko-Fi store for exclusive stock!