Saving the Asprete (Romanichthys valsanicola). Romania's living fossil fish.

[Justin_]

From the BBC website today:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54823866

A "living fossil" freshwater fish. (What is the correct term for plants and animals not evolving? I hoped it would be used somewhere in this article.)

[Shonisaurus]

Favorite could make a reproduction of this fish in the future as a group of his fish that are living fossils. Honestly, Kinto Favorie or Kaiyodo are the most suitable companies to reproduce in figure that living fossil that fortunately still exists among us. On the other hand, even Collecta could make a figure of that rare fish.

[Halichoeres]

It's very weird to see people claiming it's a 65 million year old fish. I'm not aware of any evidence for this, although there are fossils of similar (not identical!) fishes in southern Europe going back maybe 20 million years. Based on DNA similarity, the genera Romanichthys and Zingel share a common ancestor with the pikeperches (genus Zander) about 25 million years ago (https://academic.oup.com/biolinnean/article/110/1/156/2415780). These numbers are pretty ordinary for freshwater fishes. It's true that there seems to have been a lot of extinction in this group (Luciopercinae) in the late Neogene and Quaternary related to the advance and retreat of glaciers, but again, that's true for lots of Northern Hemisphere freshwater fish lineages.

There's a lot of debate about the term living fossil, and I tend to avoid it personally. When a lineage that has been heavily pruned by extinction, such that it has very few members relative to its sister group, people sometimes refer to them as relict lineages (or 'dead clades walking,' although that's only clearly identifiable in retrospect). Something like a tuatara, a hoatzin, a monotreme, or a bowfin might fall into this category.

Edited to add: when something doesn't show any phenotypic change for a long time (like the tadpole shrimp Triops), that's usually termed 'evolutionary stasis.'

[SBell]

Favorite could make a reproduction of this fish in the future as a group of his fish that are living fossils. Honestly, Kinto Favorie or Kaiyodo are the most suitable companies to reproduce in figure that living fossil that fortunately still exists among us. On the other hand, even Collecta could make a figure of that rare fish.

I think Colorata could do a fabulous freshwater fishes of the world set--they already have the 'fossil' fishes and River life (Japanese freshwater fish) sets.

[Justin_]

I think "65 million years ago" is becoming a pop science journalism trope, similar to when any mention of a dinosaur will be a "relative of T rex and Velociraptor."

"Evolutionary stasis" .... that's the term I wanted. I thought it might be "static evolution", but that could possibly be interpreted differently.

[Loon]

I don't necessarily see these tropes as bad. Sure, they could explain things with a little more depth, but if the old adage holds true, they are writing at a 3rd-grade level. I highly doubt most of the public knows what a theropod is. I'd take that kind of shorthand over calling it a "dinosaur fish" or something.