Salmon and moray eels now nest together in the LRT

Once again,
when finally brought together these taxa appear to be especially good matches for each other… except post-cranially. Now Salmo, the salmon (Fig 1), nests basal to moray eels (Gymnothorax = Lycodontis) and deep sea gulper eels (Eurypharnyx) in the large reptile tree (LRT, 2306 taxa, subset Fig 2).

Figure 1. The skull of the extant salmon (Salmo) compared to the skull of Gymnothorax funebris (formerly Lycodontis). Diagrams from Gregory 1933. Colors added here.

Billfishes and bowfins are also part of this clade
in the LRT (Fig 2), which was never designed to lump and split fish, but keeps doing a great job scoring basic traits due to the application of tetrapod homologs to skull bones. Correctly dentifying those tetrapod homologs has been the issue until now.

Figure 2. Subset of the LRT focusing on Salmo and its closest relatives, the moray eels (Gymnothorax) and the deep sea gulper eel, (Eurypharynx).

More and more taxa
are joining the bowfin, Amia, in the LRT. This appears to be a novel hypothesis of fish phylogeny. The work is still not finished. This is what life-long learning is all about.

References
wiki/Salmon
wiki/Eurypharynx
wiki/Gymnothorax