Dapedium

Dapedium (from , 'pavement') is an genus of deep-bodied ray-finned fish belonging to the extinct family Dapediidae. Dapedium lived in the Late Triassic to the Middle Jurassic period, from the late Norian to the early Aalenian, being one of the most abundant fossil fish found in Early Jurassic deposits in Europe.

== Taxonomy and evolution == The genus Dapedium was named by William Elford Leach in 1822, with the type species being D. politum named from remains from the Early Jurassic Lower Lias of Lyme Regis in Dorset, England. In 1835 Louis Agassiz, one of the most important fossil fish researchers of the 19th century, renamed the genus to the masculine form Dapedius as he did for all fossil fish he named. Subsequently, for the rest of the 19th century and most of the 20th century, Dapedius was the predominant used name for the fish, until scholarship in the late 20th century and early 21st century found that Dapedium was the correct name for the genus because it had priority.