History’s Biggest Lungfish pops up in Nebraska

This huge tooth from an ancient lungfish was languishing in a drawer (Image: K Shimada)

“The biggest lungfish on record has been uncovered in an unexpected place – a drawer in the Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln. Kenshu Shimada of DePaul University in Chicago was searching the drawers for specimens of fish teeth. For a while, the largest one he came across was the size of his thumb. Then he discovered a the biggest lungfish a “humongous” one, 117 mm wide. James Kirkland, state palaeontologist at the Utah Geological Survey, identified the tooth as coming from the upper jaw of a lungfish in the . .  genus Ceratodus, a freshwater bottom-feeder which used massive tooth plates to crunch shelled animals. . . . . Kirkland and Shimada estimate the new Ceratodus “was at least 4 metres long, (low estimate) beating the previous record of 3.5 metres for an African fossil. The biggest lungfish today come in at almost 2 metres.” Kirkland and Shimada suspect the monster lungfish,. . . . – fed on turtles.

{A resident of central Nebraska named Verne Baldwin found the tooth in 1940 and gave it to the museum. But how did it got to be in central Nebraska is a mystery, since the local rock is not from the right geological era. (or they have their geological eras wrong)  So from a devolutionists perspective: The evidence for devolution keeps turning up hidden-away in museum drawers. Here we have the Greater Ancestor to the Lungfish, the world’s biggest lungfish.} ~Chris Lesley

10:00 13 November 2010 by Jeff Hecht http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19721-historys-biggest-lungfish-pops-up-in-nebraska.html

by Greater Ancestors World Museum on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:01pm