Coccocephalichthys Temporal range:
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Family: | †Coccocephalichthyidae Fowler, 1951
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Genus: | †Coccocephalichthys Whitley, 1940
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Type species | |
†Coccocephalus wildi Watson, 1925
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Coccocephalichthys is an extinct genus of prehistoric bony fish from the Carboniferous period. The type species, C. wildi, lived during the Bashkirian age of the Pennsylvanian epoch in what is now Lancashire, United Kingdom.[2]
A specimen of C. wildi preserved fossilized brain and nerve tissue, which shows that the forebrain in this ray-finned fish was evaginated, a feature otherwise not known in actinopterygians. The results show that the everted forebrain of modern ray-fins evolved later than previously thought.[2]
The type species was first described as Coccocephalus wildi in 1925 by David Meredith Seares Watson, but because Coccocephalus is preoccupied (for an extant hemipteran insect), both Gilbert Percy Whitley[3] and Errol White & James Alan Moy-Thomas[4] proposed a new genus name in 1940. Because the article introducing the name Coccocephalichthys Whitley, 1940 was published before the article erecting the name Cocconiscus White & Moy-Thomas, 1940, the former became the valid new genus name for the Carboniferous fish.