Because lungfish have lungs and internal nostrils that can breathe air, they have long been considered the earliest terrestrial tetrapod vertebrates—the ancestors or close relatives of amphibians. By the end of the 19th century, lungfishes were once replaced by lobe-finned fishes as the ance...
The earliest representative of lungfish is the bifin fish of the middle Devonian period. On this basis, lungfishes were relatively prosperous from the Late Devonian to the Carboniferous, and only a few extremely specialized representatives live in the equatorial regions of Africa, Australia,...