Scleropages sanshuiensis: A new species of Asian Arowana from the the Eocene of Guangdong, China.
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Scleropages (Asian Arowanas) are superstars in an aquarium for their ornate colouration in some variants. Fish enthusiasts from Thailand, China (Taiwan and Hong Kong), and Japan believe that the Arowanas bring them good luck and fortune. The Arowana Fish exhibit a trans-marine distribution, living on both sides of the Wallace’s line. Among the four extant species of the genus, Scleropages formosus is distributed in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Peninsular Malaysia, Thailand, and Cambodia, Scleropages inscriptus only in Myanmar, Scleropages jardinii and Scleropages leichardti in Australia and New Guinea. This distribution of Arowanas has attracted the interests of some molecular biologists who reconstructed the biogeography based on a molecular phylogeny and molecular-clock. Fossil remains of scales, otoliths and fragments of bones of Scleropages have long been known from the Maastrichtian of India, the Maastrichtian/Late Paleocene of Africa, the Palaeocene of Europe, the Eocene of Sumatra, the Oligocene of Australia. It has been proposed that a fragment of a toothed jaw and some squamules of an undetermined osteoglossid from the continental Campanian (Late Cretaceous) of Champ-Garimond in southern France may represent as the earliest fossil record of the genus Scleropages. Recently, a complete fossil Scleropages was described from the Lower Eocene strata in Xiangxiang, Hunan Province and Songzi, Hubei Province, China that made it possible to carry out a detailed comparative analysis between the fossil and extant species for the first time. Here the author reports on the second fossil species of Scleropages from the Lower Eocene Huayong Formation in the Sanshui Basin of Guangdong Province, China.