Predation of Fishes in the Fossil Record

This review covers selected highlights of predation of fishes. Understanding this group is important. Approximately one-half of all named vertebrate species are fishes. Fishes are the original bauplan and evolutionary source for the rest of the vertebrates. Our evolutionary history as vertebrates is explainable only with an understanding of fishes, which in turn can only be fully understood in the context of predation. In the first part of this paper, I will review the most influential historical and current theories of early fish predation from the past 100 years. In the second part, I describe the specific evidence for fish predation in the fossil record.