A Short History of the Discovery of Fish Book Reviews

A Short History of the Discovery of Fish by Wayne Osborn & Pam Osborn Book Summary

A Short History of the Discovery of Fish This book is not about fish, it's about the back story of their discovery. Most of the research effort for our fish books is puzzling out who's who in the world of fishes, the species identification. The add on bits of who described to them to science (the scientific author/authors) and the year of description was merely bycatch and of anecdotal interest only. But some questions lingered. It was more than a little intriguing that many of these species were described way back in the 1700's. Why did people bother to collect and lug smelly dead fish from distant seas back to the museums of Europe? One might have thought there were far more existential issues at hand than an esoteric fixation on exotic fish classification. At the other end of the time spectrum, some fish we have known from many years of diving have only been described this century. The latest species in 2022. However, that's another story. So, I went looking (online as you do) and found some fascinating backstories. That's what this book is about. The fish are merely props on the stage. Unwitting and unpaid extras, embroidery enabling the stories. We have used our own photographs, a collection of fish images that now runs to 899 species to underpin this work. These images traverse the tropics from the Red Sea through to the Kingdom of Tonga and stretch from the temperate waters of Australia's southern coast to the equatorial tropics of Sulawesi and Raja Ampat in the Coral Triangle. As such, it is necessarily Indo-Pacific in focus. The species described are from the 1700's up to the year 1900. It's a collection of vignettes of people of their time, their achievements and sometimes their foibles. We have included a little trivia that adds to the colour and movement. Our usual theme is to list fish by order, family and genus. For this book, it's a chronological running order starting with the year the fish was described to science. The chapters are arranged by scientific author. The book starts in 1758 and cuts out 591 species later in 1900. 1758 was the earliest record and 1900 seemed a convenient year to stop. Following this course has taken us on a journey through the grand museums of Europe and on to the venerable institutions of Harvard and Stanford. Many eminent scientists of the day turned out to be responsible for describing these fish to science. Specimen collections were often made on the historic major voyages of science and discovery including James Cook's first Pacific voyage in 1768. Just doing the research has been its own voyage of discovery. We hope you enjoy the result. Wayne and Pam’s books have been downloaded in 41 countries.

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