220 
PACIFIC SCIENCE, Vol. VII, April, 1953 
New York Zoological Society, Dr. Kiyoma- 
tsu Matsubara of Kyoto University, Mr. John 
W. Reintjes of the Pacific Oceanic Fishery 
Investigations, Dr. Daniel Merriman of the 
Bingham Oceanographic Institute, Dr. Enrico 
Tortonese of the Universita di Torino, and 
Mr. George Vanderbilt of Honolulu. The of- 
ficers of the California Academy of Sciences, 
Stanford University, New York Zoological 
Society, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 
United States National Museum, Academy of 
Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and Pacific 
Oceanic Fishery Investigations Laboratory, 
Honolulu, have allowed me to examine all 
their collections of the family Paralepididae. 
The work was done in the Natural History 
Museum of Stanford University and in the 
Research Laboratory of the George Vander- 
bilt Collections of the California Academy of 
Sciences. 
HISTORY OF GENERIC CLASSIFICATION 
The family Paralepididae has been various- 
ly expanded and restricted. It has, in the past, 
encompassed a wide assortment of remark- 
ably divergent groups ‘(r/V.? Regan 1911, Parr 
1928, Fowler 1944), but it is generally accept- 
ed by recent authors that the family includes 
only the genera Paralepis, Lestidium, Macro- 
paralepis, and Sudis. The genus Luciosudis 
Fraser-Brunner belongs in the suborder Myc- 
tophoidea, probably in the family Chloroph- 
thalmidae. The genus Notosiidis Waite may 
belong in the suborder Alepisauroidea, but, 
if it does, it definitely does not belong in the 
Paralepididae. It is perhaps near the family 
Anotopteridae. The genus Neosudis Castelnau 
(1873) has not been rediscovered since the 
original account, and its systematic position 
is not known. Many characters are attributed 
to this genus which do not agree with the 
suborder Alepisauroidea as presently under- 
stood, and it is not included in the present 
study. 
The recent workers who have contributed 
most toward a better understanding of the 
classification of the Paralepididae are Regan, 
Parr, Ege, and Maul. 
Regan’s arrangement of the order Iniomi 
(1911) has been generally accepted as the 
first reasonably natural system proposed for 
these forms. He relegated Paralepididae (using 
the name Sudidae, which he later sometimes 
abandoned in favor of Paralepididae) to the 
suborder Myctophoidea together with Syno- 
dontidae, Aulopidae, and Myctophidae. Un- 
fortunately, he placed Sudidae in the wrong 
suborder because he based his family descrip- 
tion on Chlorophthalmus instead of on Sudis, 
Paralepis, or a genus closely related to them. 
While Chlorophthalmus is obviously close to 
the three families Regan placed in the sub- 
order Myctophoidea, its relationships to the 
paralepidids are distant. This unfortunate link- 
age of Chloropththalmus with the Paralepididae 
has contributed to the subsequent confusion 
of the subordinal relationships of the Myc- 
tophoidea and Alepisauroidea — confusion 
which has extended to the present. Actually 
it is clear that Sudis and its allies are more 
closely related to the Alepisauroidea than to 
the Myctophoidea and, therefore, should have 
been placed in the former suborder. Further- 
more, Regan used Sudidae as a catch-all for 
forms that did not fit into his system, and he 
divided it into three groups containing nine 
genera which previous authors had appor- 
tioned to several families. Recent authors re- 
gard his third section, exclusive of Parasudis, 
as the only one of his three divisions that 
really belongs in the Paralepididae. 
The most important extensive studies of the 
Iniomi have been those of Parr. In his survey 
of the Paralepididae (1928), he accepted and 
named Regan’s three groups as subfamilies 
and added the problematical Notosudis, which 
was described subsequent to Regan’s paper, 
as a fourth subfamily. 
Parr’s discussion of his "Paralepidini” in- 
cludes a review of all genera and species 
(mostly prepared from the literature, as he 
had little material) but his entire classification 
was greatly revised, immediately after it ap- 
peared, in a series of papers by Ege and him- 
self. Parr (1928) recognized only two genera 
