First and only warm blooded fish found (birds, feathers, evolution)

[1AngryTaxPayer]

As a biologist I find things like this completely fascinating.


https://www.livescience.com/50839-fi...ish-found.html

Researchers first suspected that something might be strange about the opah after analyzing a sample of the fish's gill tissue. According to the new study, published today (May 14) in the journal Science, the blood vessels in the tissue are set up so that the vessels carrying cool, oxygenated blood from the gills to the body are in contact with the vessels carrying warm, deoxygenated blood from the body to the gills. As a result, the outgoing blood warms up the incoming blood, a process called counter-current heat exchange.

from a 2015 article

[rjshae]

Yes it's fascinating. If there's one, there's probably more.

[guidoLaMoto]

Originally Posted by 1AngryTaxPayer

As a biologist I find things like this completely fascinating.

I agree. Evolution is so amazing that it's easy to see why Creationists (unfamiliar with The Law of Large Numbers) insist there must be a Greater Power directing it all.




While this observation doesn't exactly qualify as "warm blooded," it's a start. I've always figured some of the traits we consider definitive for a given taxon (eg- feathers in birds) must have started in earlier groups. (Sure enough, now we know some dinosaurs had feathers.) You gotta suspect that a beast as large as a dinosaur couldn't be cold blooded. With all that body mass, getting rid of heat had to be a bigger problem than retaining it.


Of course, "homeothermic" doesn't fossilize well.


I have to wonder if other fish also have this counter current mechanism? Have they looked?