Moray eel hatchlings look like Middle Triassic Ctenognathichthys

Superficially the comb-jaw-fish
is an example of convergence with moray eels. However, since Ctenognathichthys (Figs 1, 3–5) nests in the ancestry of Gymnothorax, instead this may be an example of reversal as moray eel ontogeny recapitulates this stage of phylogeny.

Xu 2021 wrote,
“During feeding, it used its long and sharp teeth to grasp and tear the prey from the substrate or to bite a piece from a larger prey item. Louwoichthys (a relative of Ctenognathichthys) might have fed on marine organism debris (e.g. dead fish and other animals). Other potential prey could have included fish eggs, arthropod larvae or small crustaceans (e.g. mysidaceans or isopods).”

Oddly, Xu 2021 did not mention Feroxichthys (Fig 6), which he had described a year earlier.

Xu 2021
held tight to the traditional view of fish systematics, writing, “Neopterygii is a taxonomically diverse group of ray-finned fishes, including Teleostei, Holostei and their closely related fossil taxa.”

On a tangential note, Mickle’s 2012 PhD dissertation
urged the adoption of a standard nomenclature for fish facial bones. She wrote, “Currently, there is no standardized nomenclatural scheme for identifying and naming the bones of the snout in lower actinopterygian fishes. This creates a situation where the same bone names are used to identify very different bones. This is problematic because it makes comparing taxa described by different scientists difficult and presents potential pitfalls for building character matrices for phylogenetic analyses. Because of the problems the absence of a standardized nomenclature scheme presents, a new set of rules for the identification of the bones of the snout of lower actinopterygians is proposed here.”