Fossil fish, Leningrad Oblast, Russia
Armoured fish Bothriolepis
Bothriolepis sp.
An armoured fish of the Devonian period — Bothriolepis, one of the characteristic armoured fishes of the Devonian.
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- Epoch
- Devonian period
- Age
- ≈ 385–375 Mya
- Origin
- Leningrad Oblast, Russia
- Size
- 50 cm
- Classification
- The genus Bothriolepis, armoured fishes
- Habitat
- Seas and fresh waters of the Devonian period
- Ref.
- R–0209
In the waters of the Devonian period there lived forms that were never repeated again. One of them is Bothriolepis, an armoured fish with a body encased in bony plates.
The head and the front part of the trunk in the bothriolepids are protected by a continuous bony box — one of the earliest attempts by life to wear armour.
The three-dimensional specimen, about fifty centimetres long, comes from Devonian deposits: the bony armour of head and thorax, jointed pectoral fins, a supple tail section.
About 380 million years old — some one hundred and fifty million years before the first dinosaurs. The specimen reads both as a document of an early stage of vertebrate evolution and as a sculptural form.
As found
A bothriolepis swims above the Devonian bottom in the same arc as our specimen: the bony armour of the body, jointed pectoral fins.