Any ancient coral or fish we could have kept?

[MetaKnight101]

Were there any types of ancient coral/ fish we could have kept in our reef tanks today if we had a time machine?

 

[Tired]

Oh, absolutely. But it's hard to know something's exact requirements, and small animals, as a general rule, don't tend to fossilize as well. So we know less about teeny little prey fish than we do about bigger predators.

I wouldn't say there were definitely things we could have put in reef tanks the way we keep them, but I'm sure someone with a time machine could set up a reef tank of prehistoric things. There were way too many species not to be at least a few candidates. I just don't know exactly what you could put in it.

 

[ichthyogeek]

^^ Like Tired said, absolutely. We know of a couple of various fish or fish-adjacents that were definitely small enough to fit in the standard aquarium. For example, Haikouichthys was about an inch long, and lived during the Cambrian Explosion (mostly I remember it from BBC's Walking With Monsters). Here's a list of prehistoric fish.