Most fish in the sea evolved on land

Although oceans have been teeming with fish for almost half a billion years, there has been new findings on their origins. In their research of evolutionary tree of ray finned fish (a mega group comprising 96% of all freshwater and marine fish species on the planet), Greta Vega and John Wiens of Stony Brook University in New York, notices something peculiar. They discovered that all the fossils belonging to the ancestral group of that gave rise to ray-fins some 300 million years ago came from freshwater deposit. However, according to the two researchers, the ray-fins did not take to the sea until about 170 million years. Their descendants now make up three quarters of all marine fish. Read more about this article in the New Scientist now available in the ORI Library.