Stratum.black
Lycoptera — Lycoptera
Lycoptera — Dwergenpaartje, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY SA 3.0

Fish

Lycoptera

Jehol fish

Lycoptera is the small Early Cretaceous freshwater fish of the Jehol Biota, found by the thousand on grey shale slabs from Liaoning and exported in bulk in the 1990s–2000s. Lycoptera plates are cheap and mostly genuine, but China's 2011 fossil regulations now restrict export of all vertebrate fossils, so new imports are problematic. Stratum flags Chinese provenance.

PhylumChordata
ClassActinopterygii
OrderOsteoglossiformes
FamilyLycopteridae
GroupFish
Rank (PBDB)genus· Paleobiology Database
AuthorMüller 1847· Paleobiology Database
Classification (PBDB)Chordata › Osteichthyes › Lycopteriformes › Lycopteridae· Paleobiology Database
Range (PBDB)143–113 Ma· Paleobiology Database
PBDB occurrences17· Paleobiology Database

Photographs

Lycoptera — Lycoptera sinensis Woodward, 1901, Holotype (NHMUK PV P 7358)
Lycoptera sinensis Woodward, 1901, Holotype (NHMUK PV P 7358) — © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London, Natural History Museum (London) Data Portal, CC BY 4.0
Lycoptera — Lycoptera middendorffi Muller, 1848 (NHMUK PV P 6728 $$)
Lycoptera middendorffi Muller, 1848 (NHMUK PV P 6728 $$) — © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London, Natural History Museum (London) Data Portal, CC BY 4.0

Age

Formations

Elsewhere

Cite this article

Stratum Study. "Lycoptera" (Taxon). Stratum Study pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-19. https://stratum.black/study/taxa/lycoptera. Accessed 2026-09-20.

BibTeX · CSL-JSON

@misc{stratum-lycoptera,
  title        = {Lycoptera},
  author       = {{Stratum Study}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://stratum.black/study/taxa/lycoptera}},
  year         = {2026},
  note         = {Taxon article, Stratum Study pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-19; sources: stratum, pbdb, wikidata, commons, nhm. Accessed 2026-09-20.}
}

Citations carry the pack version and the article's as-of date so they resolve to the same text later. The facts themselves belong to the sources listed below; cite those for the science.