unusual breakfast

 The Duckbill Fish Fraud

   Ah, the 19th century gave us many, many discoveries at a zoological level within the context of the great naturalistic voyages and discoveries in all parts of the world due to the fever of exploration, but they also left us extremely hilarious and even funny glasses, like the one we will see today, we start with the case of the duckbill fish.

Ompax spatuloides, the fish that never existed 

    It was a very interesting zoological fraud, created in Queensland, Australia, originating in August 1872, by the people of the Gayndah station.

According to the story of this fraud, the famous naturalist and director of the Brisbane Museum, Carl Theodore Staiger, was having breakfast in this town, when according They served him this strange fish, which surprised him, he quickly sketched it, having a sketch and a short description, stopped after that, and when he finished he continued eating it anyway.

It was described as a spatula fish, 18 inches in diameter and a dirty mahogany color, described as having a large beak similar to that of the platypus, so he sent a sketch and a description of the fake to the expert Francis de Laporte de Castelnau, who described the supposed "species" in 1879, having a first publication that was in the minutes of the Linnean Society of New South Wales.

Despite its official registration, doubts about the existence of the species were expressed as early as 1881, when William John Macleay included it in a faunal list of Australia, but the name continued to appear throughout the 20th century in wildlife books from that area, it was soon denied, since an unknown user sent a statement to the author of the article about this creature, saying that the locals made a chimera between an eel, a fish and possibly a platypus, in order to deceive Carl Theodore by being prepared based on:

The body of a mullet, the tail of an eel and the head of a platypus or pipefish, as well as the head of an Australian lungfish.

Despite this, it can still be found in nature guides from the 1930s of that region, it is curious as a fictitious animal and Partly created as a joke, it ended up being a myth and a little-known but shocking reference to biological frauds. Even so, there are many more cases that we will see.

[Links of interest]

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2456813

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ompax_spatuloides