#lepidotes

[justgoji]

Rhizodus, Mawsonia, Acanthodes, Protosephurus, Concavotectum, Oncorhynchus, and Lepidotes!

Note: not to scale

[aquatark]

Lepidotes - Veiled Sea

Endless Ocean Luminous, Nintendo Switch

i love the kinda brick-road-esque scales this guy's got going on... i wonder, is that just speculative, or do we actually know it looked like that?

[antiqueanimals]

Dinosaurs: Rulers of the Earth. Written by Don Lessem. Double page illustrations by Steve Kirk. Published in 1996.

Internet Archive

[philoursmars]

Deuxième étape de mon périple dans l'Ouest pour retrouver des ami(e)s lointain(e)s , Brigitte et Sylviane à La Rochelle.

Le Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. Des Ammonites en 1 et 2, puis une Encrine du Jurassique, un corail Pseudocoenia de même étage, un poisson Lepidotes lui aussi du Jurassique. Sur la suivante, de la Pyrite, un Béryl bleu, de la Labradorite et du Soufre. Et sur la dernière, un Quartz fumé.

[alphynix]

It Came From The Wastebasket #18: Lots And Lots of Lepidotes

Lepidotes was a ray-finned fish that lived during the Mesozoic, found in both freshwater and shallow marine environments. It was a member of the ginglymodian fish lineage, related to modern gars, and along with distinctive thick enamelled scales on its body it was also one of the earliest types of fish able to protrude its jaws for suction feeding.

First discovered in Jurassic-aged fossil deposits in Europe in the 1830s, this genus was quickly turned into a notorious wastebasket taxon for any similar-looking fossil fish. Over time dozens of different Lepidotes species were named, many of them rather dubious, from locations all around the world and spanning a time period of over 100 million years.

Lepidotes gigas

But despite Lepidotes being a wastebasket for almost two centuries, it wasn't until surprisingly recently that any real progress began to be made on cleaning it all up.

In the early 2010s a large-scale review of ginglymodian relationships found that many "Lepidotes" species were either invalid or polyphyletic, belonging in completely different genera or families. True Lepidotes were restricted down to just the original type species Lepidotes gigas and a few of its closest relatives, all from the early Jurassic of Europe, while some other forms were moved into the newer genera Scheenstia and Callipurbeckia. Since then some other "Lepidotes" have also been reclassified, creating new names like Macrosemimimus, Occitanichthys, and Quasimodichthys.

There's still work needing to be done on untangling all these Lepidotes-like fish – Scheenstia might actually now represent several different lineages, for example – but at least Lepidotes itself is now in a much better situation than it was just a couple of decades ago.

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Nix Illustration | Tumblr | Twitter | Patreon

[earlypalaeoart]

Restorations of 1. Tetragonolepis 2. Lepidotes 3. Amblypterus 4. Palaeoniscus 5. Platysomus

From Traité élémentaire de paléontologie; ou, Histoire naturelle des animaux fossiles, considérés dans leurs rapports zoologiques et géologiques Vol. 2 by François Jules Pictet, 1845

https://archive.org/details/traitlment02pictuoft/page/n220/mode/1up

[dinodorks]

Lepidotes maximus 

by praja38

[actual-haise]

An unlucky Lepidotes ends up as lunch for the giant aquatic theropod Spinosaurus. After reading the new discovery about my favorite dinosaur I IMMEDIATELY had to jump on a quick drawing showcasing the new look. What a fascinating animal!