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