What do you think?
Rate this book
The Rise of Fishes: 500 Million Years of Evolution
Armored fishes and monster sharks, fishes with arms and fishes that breathe air--these and many other strange creatures are part of the remarkable story told in this book. In The Rise of Fishes, John Long traces the evolutionary history of fishes over the course of 500 million years, describes the discovery of extraordinary fossil remains, and explains the techniques used in their interpretation. Featuring more than 300 color illustrations, the book includes photographs of fossils from around the world as well as the author's dramatic color illustrations of what the fish may have actually looked like. Long tells the story of how these creatures lived and developed and why their rise from the waters of the archaic seas and rivers onto land was so momentous an event in the evolution of life on earth. He combines current scientific information with entertaining stories about his own field work in Australia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Antarctica. Detailed, accessible, and lavishly illustrated, The Rise of Fishes is a book for anyone with an interest in evolution, fossils, or fish.
224 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1995
About the author
John A. Long
35 books8 followersJohn Albert Long (born 1957) is an Australian paleontologist. He currently serves as Strategic Professor in Palaeontology at Flinders University, Adelaide.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 28, 2011
Even I can tell that the text is a bit outdated in spots (for example, it talks about Pikaia from the Burgess shale as the earliest known chordate, but this was before the earlier Chengjiang fauna was studied); and the author's insistence on describing all evolution as a rise directly toward humans annoys me no end, but the real joy of the volume is the pictures!! Won't soon be replaced in that respect.
April 3, 2022
Excellent - great care went into this book, no doubt. Possibly one of the highest quality paleobiology books ever! This 2010 second edition discusses fossil discoveries as recent as the same year of publication. Every page has at least one full color photo - whether paleoart, fossil, or chart. In-depth descriptions of fish anatomy fill the text, with some history. Note: This book mostly focuses on the Cambrian through late Devonian periods.
September 25, 2026
I’m reading at least one thousand books of history in chronological order, going from the big bang through human civilization to the end of the world, and this is book #24 in that series. I've been reading about some major types of lifeforms from the Paleozoic: plants, squids, trilobites, and now we're at fish. My next and last book in this little subseries is on insects, and even though the first fish came about 50 million years before bugs (530 vs. 480 million years ago), if I had it to do again I probably would have done insects first, to finish off the invertebrates. Because one thing I really didn't expect from this book was its emphasis on the rise of tetrapods and amphibians. I expected the book to end with modern trout and carp and seahorses, but for Long it's more important to remember that fish are the creators of all bones, all vertebrates and skeletons, so the amphibians, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, reptiles, and mammals are all part of their story too. The cephalopods and trilobites are fascinating, but with fish I'm finally reading about our own ancestors. Long starts the book by saying we are all fish—fish grew legs, moved onto the land, learned to fly, grew feathers and hair, built cities, and went to the moon—and he ends it with a wonderful illustration of a human skeleton next to a Devonian fish skeleton drawn to human proportions; they're basically the same. Your arms, legs, hands, and feet are modified fins. Your jaw, your backbone, all of what makes you shaped like you originated in the Devonian oceans.
An obvious possible complaint about this is that it's too anthropocentric; the story of fish shouldn't be the story of humans. But there's enough material in here about different classes of fish that I think it rather defuses this issue. He generally proceeds chronologically, but within a cladistic framework, so there are chapters on cartilaginous fish, jawed fish, placoderms, etc., in the order that each emerges in the fossil record. This means he starts with the spineless worms that started developing bonelike features and muscles. External body plates and cartilage evolved before true bone, but by the mid-Cambrian (520 million years ago) you had true jawless fish. Jaws evolved perhaps from bones around the eyes, and then you get teeth in both bony and cartilaginous fish.
The Devonian was the great age of fishes, and he spends the bulk of the book in chapters about types of fish that flourished then, like placoderms. When I think of placoderms I think of giant apex predators like the one hanging in the AMNH, but the most successful ones were small, the size of your hand. On my last trip to the museum I discovered them not right the doorway of the Hall of Vertebrate Origins but around the backside of the first display case, against the wall. Lol. Sharks evolved 420 million years ago, so yes that's about 30 million years before trees, with some flattening into rays in the Jurassic; modern sharks were basically in place by the end of the Mesozoic, although megalodons arose and disappeared in the early Cenozoic (the same time baleen whales and, as I learned in Squid Empire, modern cephalopods were evolving).
There are then some chapters on odd groups of fish you don't see around anymore, before moving onto the ray finned and the lobe finned fish, from the late Silurian. Ray finned are the biggest and most successful group of vertebrates today, making up 29,000 of the 30,000 known fish species. A group of them called the teleostans radiated in the mid-Triassic, and today make up 28,000 of those modern species. That's all your trout, tuna, marlins, swordfish, guppies, and goldfish. Et cetera.
But the lobe-finned fish particularly interest us, because they're our ancestors. There's a lot of material on lungfishes, ancient and modern, and how swim bladders evolved into lungs. (And don't knock those ancient sharks as less developed: because cartilage weighs less than bones they don't even need swim bladders; perhaps heavy bones are a less efficient material than cartilage.) As fishes' fins developed into lobe-like structures during the Devonian, all the characteristics of terrestrial tetrapods were forming in marine fish: shoulders; a humorous, radius, and ulna in the pectoral fins; a femur, fibia, and tibia in the anal fins; the same skull bones, jaws, ears, etc. He emphasizes again and again how easy the transition to land would have been, as well as looking at why fish would want to do that (new habitats, invertebrate prey, etc.).
There were other hindrances to living on land besides the relatively simple transition to breathing air. These proto-amphibians had to deal with increased gravity (or lack of buoyancy, rather), eating, defecating, seeing and hearing, and of course reproduction, meaning both the fertilization and laying of eggs. Going from lobes to legs—e.g. getting the body up off the ground—was a big step (get it?), and the oldest trackway on earth is 395 million years old, giving us the first possible date for true terrestrial tetrapods (fish don't make trackways!). But in the final pages Long identifies the development of the amniote egg—e.g. the advent of reptiles—as the most important step in the history of land vertebrates, because then they could truly radiate away from the water. And this happened relatively quickly after the first amphibians, all in the middle to late Devonian!
This is a really accessible book, especially because of the wealth of photos, drawings, charts, and other visual material that must have taken at least as long to assemble and lay out as the actual writing did. It's written like a textbook for the general reader, but in his many descriptions of the details of long-extinct species it can get a little dense and repetitive. Sometimes it leans a bit too heavily into jargon, such as this description of a ray-finned fish: "The shoulder girdle has a postcleithrum bone present, and the skeleton of the pectoral fin has a single row of internally ossified fin radials, as opposed to the longer armlike skeletons in lobe-finned fishes. The fins are supported by many rows of segmented lepidotrichia and may have specialized 'cut-water' scales on the fin's leading edges (fringing fulcra)." It's not always like that, but if you can swim in that type of water then this is the history of fishes for you.
The previous title in my series of 1,000 history books—going chronologically from dinosaurs to pyramids to knights to spaceships, with lots of other stuff in there too—is Richard Fortey’s Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution, and the next one is Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects by Scott Richard Shaw. You can also start at the beginning with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time or see the complete list here.
An obvious possible complaint about this is that it's too anthropocentric; the story of fish shouldn't be the story of humans. But there's enough material in here about different classes of fish that I think it rather defuses this issue. He generally proceeds chronologically, but within a cladistic framework, so there are chapters on cartilaginous fish, jawed fish, placoderms, etc., in the order that each emerges in the fossil record. This means he starts with the spineless worms that started developing bonelike features and muscles. External body plates and cartilage evolved before true bone, but by the mid-Cambrian (520 million years ago) you had true jawless fish. Jaws evolved perhaps from bones around the eyes, and then you get teeth in both bony and cartilaginous fish.
The Devonian was the great age of fishes, and he spends the bulk of the book in chapters about types of fish that flourished then, like placoderms. When I think of placoderms I think of giant apex predators like the one hanging in the AMNH, but the most successful ones were small, the size of your hand. On my last trip to the museum I discovered them not right the doorway of the Hall of Vertebrate Origins but around the backside of the first display case, against the wall. Lol. Sharks evolved 420 million years ago, so yes that's about 30 million years before trees, with some flattening into rays in the Jurassic; modern sharks were basically in place by the end of the Mesozoic, although megalodons arose and disappeared in the early Cenozoic (the same time baleen whales and, as I learned in Squid Empire, modern cephalopods were evolving).
There are then some chapters on odd groups of fish you don't see around anymore, before moving onto the ray finned and the lobe finned fish, from the late Silurian. Ray finned are the biggest and most successful group of vertebrates today, making up 29,000 of the 30,000 known fish species. A group of them called the teleostans radiated in the mid-Triassic, and today make up 28,000 of those modern species. That's all your trout, tuna, marlins, swordfish, guppies, and goldfish. Et cetera.
But the lobe-finned fish particularly interest us, because they're our ancestors. There's a lot of material on lungfishes, ancient and modern, and how swim bladders evolved into lungs. (And don't knock those ancient sharks as less developed: because cartilage weighs less than bones they don't even need swim bladders; perhaps heavy bones are a less efficient material than cartilage.) As fishes' fins developed into lobe-like structures during the Devonian, all the characteristics of terrestrial tetrapods were forming in marine fish: shoulders; a humorous, radius, and ulna in the pectoral fins; a femur, fibia, and tibia in the anal fins; the same skull bones, jaws, ears, etc. He emphasizes again and again how easy the transition to land would have been, as well as looking at why fish would want to do that (new habitats, invertebrate prey, etc.).
There were other hindrances to living on land besides the relatively simple transition to breathing air. These proto-amphibians had to deal with increased gravity (or lack of buoyancy, rather), eating, defecating, seeing and hearing, and of course reproduction, meaning both the fertilization and laying of eggs. Going from lobes to legs—e.g. getting the body up off the ground—was a big step (get it?), and the oldest trackway on earth is 395 million years old, giving us the first possible date for true terrestrial tetrapods (fish don't make trackways!). But in the final pages Long identifies the development of the amniote egg—e.g. the advent of reptiles—as the most important step in the history of land vertebrates, because then they could truly radiate away from the water. And this happened relatively quickly after the first amphibians, all in the middle to late Devonian!
This is a really accessible book, especially because of the wealth of photos, drawings, charts, and other visual material that must have taken at least as long to assemble and lay out as the actual writing did. It's written like a textbook for the general reader, but in his many descriptions of the details of long-extinct species it can get a little dense and repetitive. Sometimes it leans a bit too heavily into jargon, such as this description of a ray-finned fish: "The shoulder girdle has a postcleithrum bone present, and the skeleton of the pectoral fin has a single row of internally ossified fin radials, as opposed to the longer armlike skeletons in lobe-finned fishes. The fins are supported by many rows of segmented lepidotrichia and may have specialized 'cut-water' scales on the fin's leading edges (fringing fulcra)." It's not always like that, but if you can swim in that type of water then this is the history of fishes for you.
The previous title in my series of 1,000 history books—going chronologically from dinosaurs to pyramids to knights to spaceships, with lots of other stuff in there too—is Richard Fortey’s Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution, and the next one is Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects by Scott Richard Shaw. You can also start at the beginning with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time or see the complete list here.
March 27, 2015
Such a neat book! I devoured it. Easy to read, excellent photographs--I only wish there had been even more in-depth discussion than was presented. This isn't a lengthy book by any means, hence my knocking off one star for an otherwise wonderful book. I very highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the evolution of fish.
Read
July 30, 2009The Rise of Fishes a relitively sound coveradge of the Evolution of fish and Invers/ Notocords. Cordates to the pressent
March 25, 2013
Gorgeous photos really make this book. It was much more text-booky than I expected. Still, an excellent resource if you are interested in fossil fish.
February 24, 2016
Fascinating but very dense to read - I found it hard to keep track of so many scientific names. An academic book, but good for titillating the hard-core fish watchers amongst us.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews