A Living Fossil
This is a South American Lungfish. To the untrained eye it might resemble an eel, but make no mistake, you’re looking at a living fossil. These guys have been around since the dinosaurs. Lungfish - named after the lungs that enable them to breathe air - might not have built great civilisations or lead interesting social lives, but they have successfully been failing to do this for the last 200 million years. This lungfish was swimming around in a tank at Berlin’s Natural History Museum, alternately burrowing its head in the sand and napping between seaweed. Admittedly it has had a long time to develop a conscience, but I think it’s safe to conclude that it was blissfully unaware of its superstar status among evolutionary biologists.
Which raises the question…will we make it to the 200 million year mark? I don’t know folks..We’ve been around for a mere million years and half of those were spent climbing trees. And we do have an uncanny knack for getting ourselves into trouble. But then again, trouble is fun, until is no longer fun. As the American satirist P.J. O’Rourke puts it “It will always be more fun to carry a gun around in the hills and sleep with ideology-addled college girls than to spend life behind a water buffalo or rotting in a slum” Or being a lungfish. This is by no means an endorsement of armed conflict, just an example of why humans are no lungfish. As if it wasn’t apparent already. You’re welcome.
