Enchodontidae is an extinct family of marine enchodontoid aulopiform ray-finned fish from the Cretaceous to potentially the Eocene, being found worldwide. The family itself was diverse within its body form though unlike other enchodontoids, most genera within the family possessed rows of scutes behind the head and sides of the body. Like a large amount of extinct groups, the origin of enchodontids have remained obscured though this is mostly due to a large diversification event that happened in the Late Aptian to Middle Cenomanian. Though the family is diverse in their range and anatomy, all k
Enchodontidae is an extinct family of marine enchodontoid aulopiform ray-finned fish from the Cretaceous to potentially the Eocene, being found worldwide. The family itself was diverse within its body form though unlike other enchodontoids, most genera within the family possessed rows of scutes behind the head and sides of the body. Like a large amount of extinct groups, the origin of enchodontids have remained obscured though this is mostly due to a large diversification event that happened in the Late Aptian to Middle Cenomanian. Though the family is diverse in their range and anatomy, all known members were predatory with most living in more shallow, near-shore environments.
== History == Though the family itself was erected in 1901, a number of members of the group were previously described by Agassiz and other authors. Remains of enchodontids where for a long time only known from North America and Europe and still very commonly found there. Over the last few decades, material has now been found in other regions including South America, Asia, and Africa which has expanded their biogeographic range. One of the most notable of these more recent finds is the description of various genera from the El Chango quarry located in southeastern Mexico.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).