Parodontidae

The Parodontidae, the scrapetooths, are a family of fresh water ray-finned fish belonging to the order Characiformes. The fish in this family are rheophilic and are specialised for feeding by scraping algae off rocks. The fish in this family are found in the tropical and subtropical Neotropics.

==Taxonomy== Parodontidae was first proposed as the Parodontinae, a subfamily of the family Characidae, in 1910 by the American ichthyologist Carl H. Eigenmann with Parodon as its type genus. Parodon was first proposed as a genus in 1850 by the French zoologist Achille Valenciennes in volume 22 of his and Georges Cuvier's Histoire naturelle des poissons. Valenciennes proposed it as a monospecific genus with Parodon suborbitalis as its only species, this species being the type species by monotypy. P. suborbitale was first formally described, as Parodon suborbitale, by Valenciennes in the same volume as he proposed the genus and its type locality was given as Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. This taxon has also been regarded as a subfamily of the family Hemiodontidae, but is now considered to be a valid family within the suborder Characoidei of the order Characiformes.