Osteology Identifies Fundulus capensis Garman, 1895 as a Killifish in the Family Fundulidae (Atherinomorpha: Cyprinodontiformes)

Abstract

Fundulus capensis Garman, 1895 was described from the unique holotype said to be from False Bay, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. Largely ignored by killifish taxonomists, its classification has remained ambiguous for over a century. Radiography and computed tomography of the holotype reveal skeletal details that have been used in modern phylogenetic hypotheses of cyprinodontiform lineages. Osteological synapomorphies confirm it is a cyprinodontiform killifish and allow us to identify it to species. The first pleural rib on the second vertebra and a symmetrical caudal fin with hypural elements fused into a fan-shaped hypural plate corroborate its classification in the cyprinodontiform suborder Cyprinodontoidei. The twisted maxilla with an anterior hook and the premaxilla with an elongate ascending process both place it in the family Fundulidae. The pointed neurapophyses of the first vertebra that do not meet in the midline and do not form a spine exclude it from the family Poeciliidae. Presence of discrete exoccipital condyles excludes it from the subfamily Poeciliinae. Overall shape, position of fins, and meristic data agree well with those of the well-known North American killifish, F. heteroclitus. Fundulus capensis Garman, 1895, redescribed herein, is considered a subjective synonym of Fundulus heteroclitus (Linnaeus, 1766). Provenance of the specimen remains a mystery.

When Tradition Meets Technology: Systematic Morphology of Fishes in the Early 21stCentury

“…7) to become a widely used tool in the systematic morphology of fishes (and vertebrates generally). It since has been successfully applied to a number of fossil and living fishes representing a broad taxonomic breadth, including stem gnathostomes (Giles et al, 2015), elasmobranchs (Maisey, 2001a(Maisey, , 2001b(Maisey, , 2004Pradel et al, 2009;Mollen et al, 2012;Moyer et al, 2015), basal sarcopterygians (Snitting, 2008;Boisvert, 2009), polypterids (Claeson et al, 2007;Claeson and Hagedorn, 2008), catostomids (Fink and Humphries, 2010), gymnotiforms (Carvalho and Albert, 2011;Maxime and Albert, 2014), siluriforms (Rodiles-Herna ´ndez et al, 2005;Lundberg et al, 2012Lundberg et al, , 2014Lundberg and Luckenbill, 2015, in this volume), lophiiforms (Pietsch et al, 2009;Chanet et al, 2012), fundulids (Parenti and Hartel, 2011), kurtids (Carpenter et al, 2004), anarhichadids (Bemis and Bemis, 2015, in this volume), and molids (Chanet et al, 2012). CT scanning also has been applied successfully to questions of functional morphology and other aspects of the morphology of fishes.…”

Phylogeography of Aplocheilus panchax in Indonesia, with special focus on the Bangka Island population

“…The blue panchax (Aplocheilus panchax Hamilton, 1882) is an endemic species to the Oriental region (Costa 2013;Costa 2016;Beck et al 2017), widely distributed across the Indo-Malayan Islands, including Indonesia, the Indo-China region, and India (Dekar et al 2018;Bolotov et al 2020). Aplocheilus panchax is a fish from Genus Aplocheilus, Family Aplocheilidae, Suborder Aplocheiloidei, Order Cyprinodontiformes, and Class Actinopterygii (Parenti and Hartel 2011;Furness et al 2015). Fishes belonging to Order Cyprinodontiformes are also known as Aplocheiloid killifishes or livebearers (Pohl et al 2015;Braganca et al 2018).…”