---
title: Pegasuses (Pegasidae)
scientific_name: Pegasidae
common_name: Pegasuses
rank: Family
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:57:20.003Z
tags: Pegasuses, Pegasidae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/pegasuses
---

# Pegasuses (*Pegasidae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Family
- **Scientific name:** Pegasidae
- **Body shape:** Bottom-dwelling - Stocky, big-headed, sits on the reef or sand rather than swims - scorpionfishes, groupers, gobies.
- **Species listed here:** 1

## How to recognise this group

- broad, depressed body encased in bony plates
- long, flattened snout
- large, horizontal fan-like pectoral fins
- crawls or 'walks' slowly on the substrate
- cryptic, mottled brown, grey, or green colouration

It takes its skin off in one piece. A seamoth splits the outer layer of its skin and walks out of it, leaving a transparent copy of itself behind, snout and fins and all, and it does this often: a matter of days rather than seasons.

That is a strange habit for a fish, and it follows from the body. A seamoth has no scales to replace one at a time. The trunk is a single box of fused bony plates and the tail behind it is a stack of rigid rings, so the animal is a hard surface with no give in it anywhere. A hard surface belonging to something slow that lies on silt fouls quickly, with algae and diatoms and small growth, and it cannot be cleaned. A crab answers the same problem by throwing away the entire shell. The seamoth keeps the box and renews the covering.

Everything else follows from the box too. It cannot bend, so it cannot swim the way a fish swims. It goes over the bottom on the thickened rays of its pelvic fins, one side and then the other, with the pectorals held out flat, which the species page describes properly. The snout is a long flat spade with the mouth underneath it, and that mouth extends into a short tube to draw tiny animals out of the sediment, which is the family trade of its relatives the pipefishes and seahorses, done with a shorter pipe.

One species is listed for this sea and it is rarely found, on silty sand and rubble away from the coral. Elsewhere in the range the family has a different problem: seamoths are collected, dried and sold as curios and as traditional medicine, and an armored fish that walks instead of swimming is about the easiest thing in the sea to pick up.


## Species (1)

- [Little Dragonfish (Eurypegasus draconis)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/pegasuses/little-dragonfish)

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/pegasuses)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*