Osteoglossidae, or bony tongued fishes, are a small group of freshwater fishes including arapaima and arowanas, found today in Australia, Africa, southeast asia and South America
This family goes all the way back to the late Cretaceous, and though low in diversity now, were common worldwide in both marine and freshwater environments in the Paleogene, with modern groups potentially having adapted to freshwater several times
Macroprosopon shows how diverse this radiation was, with an elongated snout and sharp conical teeth unlike any of today’s bony-tongues. This large predatory fish used its jaws to snap up smaller fish along the tropical southern coasts of the Eocene Tethys sea
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