Cypriniformes pack carps, minnows, loaches into one giant order
Cypriniformes is a vast order of ray-finned fishes splitting into barbs, loaches, botias, carps, danionins, minnows, and more. It is often called an “order of ostariophysans,” binding many of the world’s freshwater aquarium and food fishes into one evolutionary sheet.
Cypriniformes share the Weberian apparatus of other ostariophysan fishes, and their nearest relatives are the characins, the electric eel and knifefishes, and the catfishes. Unlike most of those relatives they have only a single dorsal fin, with no fleshy adipose fin behind it, and they carry a unique small median snout bone called the kinethmoid. Older definitions lumped in every ostariophysan except catfish, leaving the group paraphyletic until characins, knifefishes and Gonorhynchiformes were split off.
Carps and minnows, the Cyprinidae, account for two-thirds of the order and form one of the largest fish families, spread across Eurasia, North America and Africa. Most live only in fresh water, though roach and bream also enter brackish water. Hillstream loaches and the handful of Gyrinocheilidae graze algae and small invertebrates in the mountain streams of tropical and subtropical Asia, while the suckers, Catostomidae, inhabit temperate North America and eastern Asia. Maurice Kottelat revised the loach superfamily Cobitoidei in 2012.
Diversity peaks in South-east Asia, the favoured birthplace, although a rival idea puts the origin in South America, with the fish crossing via Africa or North America before the continents parted, since they cannot survive salt water. No fossils older than the Cenozoic were known until 2025, when jaws, tooth plates and vertebrae turned up in Alaska's Prince Creek Formation, dated to 71 to 69 million years ago. Extinct families include the Jianghanichthyidae from the Paleocene and Eocene of China.
Many cyprinids are major food fish in Europe and Asia, and goldfish and koi are the celebrities of the aquarium trade. Suckers carry some angling value, while East Asian minnows, or sharpbellies, sit in their own family, Xenocyprididae, named by Albert Günther in 1868.
Source: Cypriniformes
