Carl Zimmer has the story.
A graduate student at the University of Chicago named Matt Friedman was starting to research his dissertation on the diversity of teleosts. While paging through a book on fish fossils, he noticed a 50-million year old specimen called Amphistium. Like many fish fossils, this one only showed the bones from one side of the animal. It was generally agreed that Amphistium belonged to some ordinary group of teleosts, although biologists argued over which one. But Friedman saw something different. To him it looked like a flounder.
[Via LGF]
Seems a bit fishy to me.
50 million is 1/90th the earths life. It must have been a fluke! Which should be my sole answer except I like to flounder.
The observations are good basic science, but conclusions are another thing. We don’t need to go back 50 million years to see animals with shared traits.
The real question is, if you filet them, would they still be good eat’n?
Definitely a weird fish.
Ken: are you fin-ished yet?