They can breathe both air and water, which allows them to inhabit aquatic environments that are low in oxygen. They typically inhabit freshwater lakes, brackish water near coastal areas, swamps, and sluggish backwaters of rivers and streams. They have an olive brown to green, torpedo-shaped body armored with ganoid scales, elongated jaws that form a needle-like snout nearly three times the length of its head, and a row of numerous sharp, cone-shaped teeth on each side of the upper jaw. References are made to gars being a primitive group of bony fish because they have retained some primitive features, such as a spiral valve intestine, but they are not primitive in the sense of not being fully developed. The genus may have been present in North America for about 100 million years. The longnose gar (Lepisosteus osseus), also known as longnose garpike or billy gar, is a ray-finned fish in the family Lepisosteidae.
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