Proceedings of the United States National Museum SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION • WASHINGTON, D.C. Volume 124 1968 Number 3647 The Suborders of Perciform Fishes By William A. Gosline 1 Senior Post-Doctoral Fellow, Division of Fishes Introduction The basic concept and limits of the order Perciformes (Percomorphi) as defined by Regan (in various papers but especially 1929) seem to me to be the best yet proposed. Patterson (1964) has presented the view that the Perciformes are polyphyletic. In the same broad sense that mammals are polyphyletic (cf. Simpson, 1959) this may well be, but the particular lines of polyphyletic perciform derivation drawn by Patterson (1964) seem highly unconvincing (Gosline, 1966b). Still more recently, Greenwood, et al. (1966), have removed some of the forms here included in the perciform fishes to the separate superorders Atherinomorpha and Paracanthopterygii. This action, which seems to me to involve a confusion between convergence and inheritance, is in my opinion untenable (see below). Various people, including Regan (1936) and the present author (1962), have tinkered with the boundary lines established by Regan (1929) for the Perciformes. Of such authors, Berg (1940) made the most drastic changes. The question of whether to include certain groups in or exclude them from the Perciformes is certainly moot. Here, aside from the exclusion of the callionymoid fishes, I follow the old perciform boundaries of Regan (1929). 1 Department of Zoology, University of Hawaii, Honolulu 96822.
BioStor
