Word: lungfish
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Last December a lungfish from a pond in British East Africa was placed in a large tin can filled with wet mud. This creature, something like a catfish, something like a small eel, struggled through the mud to the top of the can occasionally to breathe air; but as the mud dried and hardened, the lungfish was held fast at the bottom. Six months later, the can reached its destination, a biological supply house in Chicago. The can was opened, the cylindrical mold of dried mud delicately picked away, the lungfish removed. It was alive. The fish, gaunt from...
...Lungfish are evolutionary survivors of the Devonian period (300-400 million years ago) when many forward-looking fish were experimenting with lungs. The lungfish are related to those intrepid pioneers which crawled up on land to become ancestors of reptiles, mammals and birds; also to the Coelacanths, which had fins like rudimentary limbs and which were thought by scientists to have been extinct for 50,000,000 years?until last year, when an astonishing live Coelacanth was brought up in a fishing net off the South African coast (TIME, April 3). The lungfish of today are evolutionary laggards. By coming...
...exchange (carbon dioxide for oxygen) in lungs. Last week he pointed out that animals make structural adaptations to the available oxygen supply as to any other environmental circumstance. Frogs and toads living in oxygen-deficient waters grow abnormally large, those in oxygen-abundant waters abnormally small. South American lungfish develop extra gills when they go down to guard eggs on the oxygen-deficient bottom. Whales when diving supply oxygen only to their brains and their heartbeats fall from about So per minute to four or five...
...live lungfish from the central take region of East Africa have been purchased by the directors and placed on exhibition for students, it was disclosed recently by Arthur Loveridge, curator of Reptiles and Amphibians in the Museum of Comparative Zoology...
...Four years ago Author Homer AY. Smith transported to the U. S., after a Guggenheim-sponsored year in Africa, 28 lungfish (Protoplecus acthiapicus Heckel). Twenty-seven of them died. Fortnight ago the 28th had completed three and one-half years of estivation in its mud-pie in a laboratory at New York University Medical College...