Yellowhead butterflyfish
species of fish
Chaetodon xanthocephalus, known commonly as the yellowhead butterflyfish, is a species of marine fish in the family Chaetodontidae. It is found in the Indian Ocean.
Taxonomy
The yellowhead butterflyfish was first formally described in 1833 by the English naturalist Edward Turner Bennett (1797–1836) with the type locality given as Ceylon. It belongs to the large subgenus Rabdophorus which might warrant recognition as a distinct genus. It has been recorded hybridising with saddle butterflyfish (C. ephippium).
Description
The yellowhead butterflyfish has a pearly white body with a golden-yellow band of colour on the head, along the dorsal and ventral parts of the body and on the fins. The white is broken by greyish blue chevrons. It has a short black vertical bar running through the eyes and a thin yellow line on the rear of the operculum. The orange dorsal and anal fins have light blackmarks on their lower rear parts and yellow margins. The caudal fin is light grey also edged in yellow.
“Yellowhead butterflyfish” enters the record as species of fish. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Yellowhead, butterflyfish and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Yellowhead butterflyfish” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Yellowhead, butterflyfish and species provides the most credible route into that argument.
The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2612982. The first chronological checks are 1833, 1797 and 1836.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yellowhead butterflyfish” 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.