http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130422111110.htm
A professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
(ESF) in Syracuse, N.Y., has put aside nearly a century and a half of
conventional wisdom with the rediscovery of a species of giant Amazonian
fish whose existence was first established in a rare 1829 monograph only to
be lost to science some 40 years later.
The fish described in the monograph had been collected in the Brazilian Amazon about 1819 and
carried to Munich, Germany, as a dried skeleton. There the Swiss biologist Louis Agassiz, who was
just beginning his career and later became a professor of zoology at Harvard University, supervised a
technical illustrator in drawing the complete skeleton in great detail. At that time, however, he applied
the name Sudis gigas to the drawings. That rare skeleton was in a museum in Germany until World War
II, when it was destroyed by a bomb dropped on the museum. "To this day, we do not know the precise
locality where the fish was collected because the German scientist who collected it died before indicating
where he found it, and nobody has found a second specimen," Stewart said. "So, all that exists to know
the status of A. agassizii is the original drawings of its bones."
A professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
(ESF) in Syracuse, N.Y., has put aside nearly a century and a half of
conventional wisdom with the rediscovery of a species of giant Amazonian
fish whose existence was first established in a rare 1829 monograph only to
be lost to science some 40 years later.
The fish described in the monograph had been collected in the Brazilian Amazon about 1819 and
carried to Munich, Germany, as a dried skeleton. There the Swiss biologist Louis Agassiz, who was
just beginning his career and later became a professor of zoology at Harvard University, supervised a
technical illustrator in drawing the complete skeleton in great detail. At that time, however, he applied
the name Sudis gigas to the drawings. That rare skeleton was in a museum in Germany until World War
II, when it was destroyed by a bomb dropped on the museum. "To this day, we do not know the precise
locality where the fish was collected because the German scientist who collected it died before indicating
where he found it, and nobody has found a second specimen," Stewart said. "So, all that exists to know
the status of A. agassizii is the original drawings of its bones."
