Peristedion

Peristedion is a genus of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the subfamily Peristediinae, the armoured gurnards or armored sea robins. These fishes are found in Atlantic and Indo-West Pacific ocean waters.

==Taxonomy== Peristedion was first described as a genus in 1801 by the French naturalist Bernard Germain de Lacépède when he described Peristedion marmalat from the Mediterranean Sea and the Moluccas. In 1826 Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent designated P. marmalat as the type species of the genus. P. marmalat is now treated as a junior synonym of Carl Linnaeus's Trigla cataphracta, which he described from the Mediterranean Sea off southern France. Within the family Peristediidae there are 2 clades. One, which contains Peristedion, is a monotypic clade, while the other clade is made up of the remaining 5 genera of the Peristediidae. The name of the genus Peristedion is a combination of peri, meaning "around", and stedion, which is a diminutive of stethos, which is Greek for "breast" or "chest", an allusion to the bony plates lining the underside of the body, similar to a plastron, the feature Lacépède use to distinguish Peristidion from Trigla.