Asineops
genus of fishes
Asineops is an enigmatic genus of extinct freshwater ray-finned fish from the Eocene. It is the only member of the family Asineopidae and contains a single species, A. squamifrons, from the famous Green River Formation of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. It was described by Edward Drinker Cope in 1870. The name comes from the Greek for "donkey-faced".
Asineops is known from all three prehistoric lakes that would eventually become the Green River Formation, although it is only common in the former Lake Gosiute's deposits. It is extremely rare in the famous Fossil Lake deposits.
Some sources, including Cope, considered it allied with the pirate perch and classified Asineops with it in the family Aphredoderidae. However, more recent analysis indicates that it lacks many of the traits of that family. Other sources still consider it a percopsisform and related to the sympatric percopsiform Erismatopterus. However, an affinity to the Polymixiiformes or Perciformes has also been suggested.
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This entry incorporates text from “Asineops” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.