Fossil herrings from the Eocene Green River Formation of the western United States where Colorado, Utah and Nevada meet. Herrings are one of the small-bodied groups of bony fishes that survived the end-Cretaceous extinction and persist to this day in marine environments. (Credit: Photo by Matt Friedman)From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2009) — Large size and a fast bite spelled doom for bony fishes during the last mass extinction 65 million years ago, according to a new study.
Today, those same features characterize large predatory bony fishes, such as tuna and billfishes, that are currently in decline and at risk of extinction themselves, said Matt Friedman, author of the study and a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago.
"The same thing is happening today to ecologically similar fishes," he said. "The hardest hit species are consistently big predators."
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