A few years ago I wrote a book titled “Relics”, which was a way of expressing my fascination with both time travel and with all the irreplaceable forms of life that had existed long before our species sneakily appeared when Nature wasn’t paying attention. One of the organisms I really wanted to include in the book was the lungfish, a direct descendant of the organism that gave rise to all tetrapods, including you and me. Alas, I had never photographed or even seen a lungfish, and thus could not add it to the book.

Imagine my confusion, surprise, delight, disappointment, and hope when yesterday I finally ran across one of those amazing animals. I was driving around with a few friends around an area south of the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique and at some point we stopped near a small settlement by an old oxbow lake. We saw a few fishermen and decided to see their catch. And there, among catfish and tilapias, I spotted what at first I took for a giant salamander. A second later I realized that I was looking at an African lungfish (Protopterus annectens), a spitting image of Devonian, air-breathing, land-walking animals, the first to evolve lungs, tetrapod locomotion and, as a recent study reveals, structures that eventually lead to the formation of our ears.

Alas, the fish were already dead and gutted. I was heartbroken – it felt to me as if somebody shot a triceratops for its horns or squashed a trilobite as a bug. How can you eat a relic? But my next thought was, since they are already dead, why shouldn’t I eat them? How many biologists could say that they ate a lungfish? Unfortunately, we still had many hours of driving ahead of us and I had no way keeping it cool and safe from the African sun. The only option was to eat it raw. Did I? No, I didn’t, I chickened out, but only because of the fear of contracting some dreadful disease from the water in which the carcasses were washed. But this encounter also made me hopeful that soon I will be able to catch a live one and properly document it. I have just arrived in Gorongosa, and I know that lungfish are here. The hunt commences tomorrow.

Update [4April 2014]: I got it! Read about my encounter with the first live lungfish.