---
title: Guitarfish (Rhinobatidae)
scientific_name: Rhinobatidae
common_name: Guitarfish
rank: Family
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:28:58.984Z
tags: Guitarfish, Rhinobatidae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/guitarfish
---

# Guitarfish (*Rhinobatidae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Family
- **Scientific name:** Rhinobatidae
- **Body shape:** Flattened - Pressed flat top-to-bottom, lies on the bottom - rays, flounders, crocodilefishes.
- **Species listed here:** 4

## How to recognise this group

- distinctive guitar or shovel-like outline
- flattened head and trunk tapering to an elongated body
- small, ray-like pectoral fins fused to head
- sandy to grey-brown dorsal surface, often with spots or patterns
- often resting partially buried in sand or mud

The outline is old. Rays shaped like this, a flat shovel of a head running back into a shark's body and tail, are in the fossil record from the Jurassic, laid down in the same fine European limestones that preserved the first birds, and they are recognizably the animal that crosses a sand flat today. Whatever the design is good at, it has been good at it for a very long time.

It is also not a halfway house between a shark and a ray, whatever it looks like. A guitarfish is a fully committed ray, with gill slits on the underside, pectoral fins joined to the head and eyes on top, that simply never gave up its back half. Two upright dorsal fins and a tail with a working lower lobe mean it swims like a shark, driven from behind, while the flattened front end does the steering and the digging. Most rays fly or ripple. This one is pushed.

The combination buys a particular life. A guitarfish can cross open ground faster than a stingray, work water shallow enough to leave its back nearly awash, then disappear by settling and shuffling sand over itself, and it feeds on crabs and buried shellfish it locates without ever seeing them. It belongs to sand flats, seagrass and turbid shallows rather than to coral, which is why divers ask about them and hardly ever meet one.

Four species are listed here, among them the bowmouth guitarfish, a heavy blue-gray animal with thorn ridges over its eyes. All of them are in trouble. Shallow soft bottom is exactly where inshore nets work, their fins are among the most valuable in the trade, and the family as a whole is now one of the most threatened groups of fishes in the sea. Records from this coast are thin, and most of what is known about the local species comes off fishing boats rather than from anyone watching one.


## Species (4)

- [Bowmouth Guitarfish (Rhina ancylostomus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/guitarfish/bowmouth-guitarfish)
- [Clubnose Guitarfish (Glaucostegus thouin)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/guitarfish/clubnose-guitarfish)
- [Halavi Guitarfish (Glaucostegus halavi)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/guitarfish/halavi-guitarfish)
- [Whitespotted Guitarfish (Rhinobatos punctifer)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/guitarfish/whitespotted-guitarfish)

---

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