This Fish Can Live on Land.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 15, 9 April 1913, Page 3

This Fish Can Live on Land.

A fish that can live out of water for months is a recent addition to the collection of scientific curiosities at the American Museum of Natural History. It comes from Africa.

The specimen is known as a lung fish, because when out of water it inhales air as if it were a land-living animal, though ■when in the water it breathes through gills,

The ability to breathe out of water preserves the ‘life of the lung fish when caught in the mud of a dried-up stream during the summer drought.

The fish was received in a dormant condition, burrowed deep in a clod of earth which had been dug from a dried up river bottom. When received at the museum the cake of earth showed, a little tunnel-like'upenh'g through which the fish got its supply of air.

The' lung fish is exhibited in an aquari uiu in the hall of fossil fishes. It has been placed there since it belongs, scientifically, among fishes which lived mil lions of years ago, and whose species is almost extinct.

It has further claim to scientific inter est because it pictures the kind of fish which gave rise to the earliest land-liv-ing animals. The fish is- known by anatomists to have many similarities to the salamander. In a general way its limbs represent a stage between tins and hands, anil it uses. them in a.fajii.on which suggests a salamander. Sulfur as is known, this is the second specimen of a. living lung fish to be taken to the United States.