Rays are distinguished by their flattened bodies, enlarged pectoral fins that are fused to the head, and gill slits that are placed on their ventral surfaces.

Batoids are flat-bodied, and, like sharks, are cartilaginous fish, meaning they have a boneless skeleton made of a tough, elastic cartilage.

Batoids have a ventrally located mouth and can considerably protrude their upper jaw (palatoquadrate cartilage) away from the cranium to capture prey.

[5] Bottom-dwelling batoids breathe by taking water in through the spiracles, rather than through the mouth as most fish do, and passing it outward through the gills.

Internal fertilization is advantageous to batoids as it conserves sperm, does not expose eggs to consumption by predators, and ensures that all the energy involved in reproduction is retained and not lost to the environment.

[7] Capture-induced parturition is rarely considered in fisheries management despite being shown to occur in at least 12% of live bearing sharks and rays (88 species to date).

Most batoids have a cosmopolitan distribution, preferring tropical and subtropical marine environments, although there are temperate and cold-water species.

A clade within this diverse family, the Neoselachii, emerged by the Triassic, with the best-understood neoselachian fossils dating from the Jurassic.

Chimaera) Selachimorpha (Sharks) Torpediniformes Rhinopristiformes Rajiformes Myliobatiformes However, a 2011 study significantly reevaluated the phylogeny of batoids, using nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from 37 taxa, representing almost all recognized families and all of the traditional four major lineages.

This is a far more numerous and diverse set of sample taxa than in any previous study, producing findings reflected in the cladogram below.