Giants Lurking In The Drawer

Paleontologists can make spectacular discoveries in remote badlands and deserts. But there are also things waiting to be found--or at least recognized--in the back rooms of museums. Things like giant filter-feeding fish. The giant filter-feeding fish in this painting was discovered by Matt Friedman, a paleontologist at the University of Oxford. Friedman knows a thing or two about the treasures lurking in museum drawers. As I wrote in 2008, he showed that previously neglected fossils were actually transitional forms that track the evolution of the bizarre bodies of flatfish. Recently Friedman took a trip to the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Colorado to check out some other fish fossils. While he was there, the center paleontologists asked him to take a look at a massive slab of rock they had just brought in. They knew it contained a fish that dated back to some time between 89 and 66 ...