Abstract

Ginglymodian fishes are abundant and diverse in Upper Jurassic limestones of Germany, but rarer in coeval sequences in France. Only a single ginglymodian is so far known from the Tithonian at Canjuers. Our study of this excellently preserved specimen revealed that it represents a new taxon †Occitanichthys canjuersensis gen. et sp. nov., which is retrieved in a cladistic analysis as a member of the semionotiform family †Callipurbeckiidae. Additionally, two specimens among fishes from the Middle Purbeck Beds at Swanage referred to †Callipurbeckia minor were found to represent the new callipurbeckiid taxon. The new taxon inhabited the epicontinental seas that covered most of Europe connecting the Tethys with the North Atlantic during Jurassic and Cretaceous, and its minimum biochron ranges from the Early Tithonian to the Early Cretaceous.
After incorporation of the new and recently described taxa and the re-evaluation and addition of morphological characters, our cladistic analysis recovered a somewhat different
pattern of relationships compared with previous phylogenetic hypotheses for Ginglymodi. Mainly, in the new topology, a monophyletic †Lepidotidae includes the Jurassic genera †Lepidotes and †Scheenstia, and the Tithonian–Berriasian †Camerichthys from Spain, which has been classified in †Semionotiformes.Among semionotiforms,our results retrieved the family †Macrosemiidae as the sister group of †Semionotidae occupying a more distal
position within the clade †Semionotiformes than previously thought.