Today's albacore tuna are highly advanced marine teleosts, or bony fish, whose earliest ancestors are generally believed to have emerged during the Mesozoic Era, roughly 65 to 210 million years ago. Albacore are members of the Scombridae family, which includes 40 to 50 species of tuna and mackerel, 23 of which are found, for at least a part of their life, in waters off the coast of North America. Bonnaterre (1788) is credited with giving albacore its scientific name, Thunnus alalunga. A general classification scheme (Nelson 1976) for albacore is as follows:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Osteichthyes
Subclass: Actinopterygii
Infraclass: Teleostei
Order: Perciformes
Suborder: Scombroidei
Family: Scombridae
Subfamily: Scombrinae
Genus: Thunnus
Species: alalunga