Wednesday, 11 March 2009

Do Not Mess With Fish 57!

and you thought fish were fun! well these ones are so long as they stay small, dubbed the "Dracula" fish, the creature is about 17mm (0.7 inches) long and has been found in only one Burmese stream, the researchers, from London's Natural History Museum (NHM), believe the fish lost its teeth over evolutionary time, but later evolved the bone fangs,
Dr Britz, who has worked with Burmese wildlife for more than a decade, named the species Danionella dracula in honour of mythology's most eminent fanged predator, the tiny specimens came to the UK in a consignment of aquarium fish, and at first the researchers mistook them for another related species, "After a year or so in captivity they started dying; and when I preserved them and looked at them under the microscope, I thought 'my God, what is this, they can't be teeth'," Dr Britz told BBC News, rather than being true teeth, the fangs are made of bone, "And when I looked in more detail, and stained the bone and cartilage with different colours and used an enzyme to dissolve away the muscle, I saw they clearly were not teeth, instead, the jawbones appear to have developed rows of sharp protrusions resembling teeth and presumably serving the same purpose - plus, in the males, these extraordinary fangs, using DNA data to place the new species in its family tree, the researchers believe the lineage lost its teeth about 50 million years ago,
fangs for the memory as the song goes!

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