Discover Magazine
Fish fossils from a 62.2 million-year-old Egyptian site may be rewriting what we know about marine evolution and filling in vital gaps in the prehistoric record.
It may be hard to imagine, but Egypt’s golden desert was once mostly

covered by seas. Within those seas, a variety of aquatic life lived during the Age of Dinosaurs. And, like the dinosaurs, many of them may have succumbed to the same fate triggered by the Chicxulub asteroid.
The results of the End Cretaceous mass extinction event not only reshaped the flora and fauna on land but also transformed marine life. As devastating as this event was, it may have opened the door for modern fish species to evolve. However, there has been little fossil evidence to paint an accurate timeline of this transition, until now.
Publishing their findings in Science Advances, an international research team may have uncovered a fossil that not only provides evidence for this transition but also reveals that fish communities, similar to modern ones, were already in place some 4 million years earlier than previously confirmed in the fossil record.