Caruso brachysomus
species of fish
Caruso brachysomus is an extinct species of ray-finned fish belonging to the family Lophiidae, the goosefishes, monkfishes and anglers, within the order Lophiiformes, the anglerfishes. It was described by Louis Agassiz in 1835 from the Monte Bolca locality. It became extinct during the middle Eocene (lowermost
Lutetian).
Species known from three or four individuals. Habitat of this species described as place in a tropical or subtropical, moderately deep basin like a coastal lagoon in inner continental shelf regions of the central Tethys Sea, with reduced hydrodynamic energy and episodic anoxic conditions, with soft mud or sand bottoms, much like extant members of the family.
Together with Sharfia mirabilis this species is one of the oldest member of the family Lophiidae known to date. It was initially figured by Giovanni Serafino Volta in 1796, who inaccurately assigned one specimen to the extant Lophius piscatorius and another to Loricaria plecostomus. It was described as its own species, Lophius brachysomus, by Agassiz in 1835. In 2012 the new genus Caruso was proposed for this species, and Caruso was resolved, in a phylogenetic analysis, to be a most closely related to the extant Sladenia, and Caruso and Sladenia are a sister taxon to the rest of Lophiidae.
It was stated to have large triangular opercles, a facial support structure and protective covering for the gills of many bony fish, with concave anterior and anteroventral margins and a peculiar cancellous texture on its medial surface, as seen through its fossilized remains.
“Caruso brachysomus” enters the record as species of fish. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Caruso, brachysomus and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Caruso brachysomus” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Caruso, brachysomus and species provides the most credible route into that argument.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16069656. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1835, 1796 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Caruso brachysomus” 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.