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. 



