Description
Knightia is an extinct genus of clupeiform bony fish in the family Herringidae, which lived during the Eocene in the freshwater lakes and rivers of North America. The genus was named in 1907 by David Starr Jordan in honor of the late Professor Wilbur Clinton Knight of the University of Wyoming, “an indefatigable student of Rocky Mountain paleontology.” Knightia is the state fossil of Wyoming and is the most frequently excavated fossil fish in the world. Fossils include all the remains and traces of plants and animals preserved in rocks. Contrary to popular belief, fossils are not necessarily “petrified”; many fossils are indeed not petrified. Even in very old rocks, fossil remains have been found that have undergone minimal change. Furthermore, fossils are not always very old; many recent fossils are known, formed during periods within human memory. Paleontology, the science that studies fossils, contributes to the study of rock sequences, a branch of geology called biostratigraphy. Because the remains of life fossilize only under specific conditions, fossil information is limited and inherently "incomplete." The word "fossil" is often associated with the bones of dinosaurs or mammoths, and indeed, the hard parts of an organism are most likely to be preserved through fossilization. For vertebrates, these are the bones and especially the teeth. The softer tissues of an organism are rarely preserved unless they are quickly covered by a layer that protects them from decay or predation. With only the hard parts, it can be difficult to obtain a complete picture of an organism. An example of this is the Conodonta, which for a long time were known only from their tooth-like fossils.
