Acanthopterygii
Searched as Acanthopterygii indet.. The Paleobiology Database treats Acanthopterygii as the accepted name.
Acanthopterygii is a superorder of bony fishes in the class Actinopterygii. Members of this superorder are sometimes called ray-finned fishes for the characteristic sharp, bony rays in their fins; however, this name is often given to the class Actinopterygii as a whole.

Rickard Zerpe · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- TeleosteomorphaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
Time the record covers
At least 68 million years on record.
The record covers at least 72.2 Mya to 3.6 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 83.6 Mya to 2.58 Mya.
8 occurrences of Acanthopterygii on record, most of them in the Late Cretaceous. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
8 occurrences- Late Cretaceous63%
- Eocene25%
- Pliocene13%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
3 formations
- Dinosaur Park Formation · Belly River Group5
- La Meseta Formation1
- Submeseta Formation1
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The named rock units Acanthopterygii has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 1 occurrence has no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Acanthopterygii and its relatives
Late CretaceousWhere Acanthopterygii and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.
Found in the same rock
3,404 taxa- Lates niloticus64 sites
- Synodontis53 sites
- Hydrocynus47 sites
- Cichlidae43 sites
- Clarias41 sites
- Polypterus37 sites
- Lates35 sites
- Bunocharax sp.32 sites
- Protopterus32 sites
- Chrysichthys29 sites
- Geochelone29 sites
- Trionyx27 sites
- Gymnarchus26 sites
- Suidae25 sites
- Aves24 sites
- Barbus24 sites
- Crocodylus24 sites
- Euthecodon brumpti23 sites
- Clariidae22 sites
- Myliobatis22 sites
- Lepisosteus21 sites
- Crocodylia20 sites
- Trionychidae20 sites
- Crocodylus niloticus19 sites
The Paleobiology Database records at least 636 sites for Acanthopterygii, and this reads 240 of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
3 references- The structure of Late Cretaceous (late Campanian) nonmarine aquatic communities: a guild analysis of two vertebrate microfossil localities in Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada5
- Before the freeze: otoliths from the Eocene of Seymour Island, Antarctica, reveal dominance of gadiform fishes (Teleostei)2
- Small vertebrates from the Late Pliocene Las Higueruelas locality of central Spain with new biochronological and palaeoecological inferences1
Each of the 8 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Acanthopterygii
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Rickard Zerpe
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Acanthopterygii was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itTeleosteomorpha through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0.