Massive Two-Ton Fish Species Discovered
It took scientists four years to find the newest species of the world’s largest bony fish.
A new species of enormous ocean sunfish was discovered after an intensive search, making it the first species of this type of fish to be identified in 130 years.
Despite being the largest bony fish in the world and weighing more than two tons, sunfish are quite elusive, which made the four-year search difficult.
A team of researchers led by Marianne Nyegaard, a PhD student at Murdoch University in Australia, analyzed more than 150 sunfish DNA samples and recognized four distinct species—but only three of the species had been previously identified. (Read about a new species of a transparent frog discovered in Costa Rica.)
This discovery led Nyegaard to believe that there was an additional sunfish species that hadn’t been documented,
