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b'This week we have a mystery fish from Australia, the ompax!\\n\\nMain source consulted:\\n\\nWhitley, G. P. (1933). Ompax spatuloides Castelnau, a Mythical Australian Fish. The American Naturalist, 67(713), 563\\u2013567. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2456813\\n\\nThe fateful Ompax drawing:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe freshwater longtom (picture by Barry Hutchins):\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nFor the Patreon episode this month, we had a bird mystery from Queensland, Australia. While I was researching it I came across this mystery fish, also from Queensland.\\n\\nIn 1872, a man named Karl Staiger visited the town of Gayndah as part of his job. He was a chemist, but he also had an interest in nature and years later he worked for the Queensland Museum. One morning in Gayndah he went to breakfast and was served a strange-looking fish\\u2014so strange-looking that he asked what it was. He was told it was a very rare fish found in the nearby Burnett River.\\n\\nStaiger was interested enough that he asked the road inspector, presumably one of his coworkers, to draw the fish for him. But the drawing wasn\\u2019t made until after Staiger ate the fish. It was his breakfast and he was hungry and, as he wrote later, he didn\\u2019t know he should have at least saved the head for study. Presumably he also didn\\u2019t want his breakfast to get cold while the drawing was being made.\\n\\nThe road inspector was a careful artist although he wasn\\u2019t a naturalist himself, so he did what he could to draw the fish accurately from the remains of Staiger\\u2019s meal. According to the drawing, the fish had a long, flattened rostrum that looked a little like a very long, thin duckbill, big scales on its body, and a fin that went all the way around the edges of the tail starting about halfway down the back, which appeared to be connected dorsal, caudal, and ventral fins. Its pectoral fins were small, and its eyes were also small and near the top of its head. The fish was brown in color and about 18 inches long, or 46 cm.\\n\\nStaiger eventually wrote to a French naturalist and sent him the drawing. The French naturalist has about 500 names and titles, usually shortened to something like Francis de Laporte de Castelnau. I\\u2019m going to call him Francis because obviously I can\\u2019t pronounce any of those names properly.\\n\\nFrancis saw at a glance that the fish was unlike anything he\\u2019d ever seen before. He suspected it didn\\u2019t just deserve its own genus but its own family. Staiger had reported what he\\u2019d been told, that the fish was known from a particular part of the Burnett River, and he\\u2019d also mentioned that it lived in the same area as another strange fish, the Australian lungfish.\\n\\nThe Australian lungfish had only been described a few years before, in 1870, and it\\u2019s a very big fish. It can grow up to 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, and is greenish in color. It has big overlapping scales on its body and four strong fins that look more like flippers than ordinary fish fins, which it uses to stand and walk on the bottom of the river. Its tail comes to a single rounded point and it has tooth plates instead of regular teeth, which it uses to crush the small animals it eats. It also has a single lung in addition to gills, and like other lungfish it comes to the surface every so often to replace the air in its lung. When it\\u2019s especially active it will breathe at the surface more often. The ability to breathe air allows it to survive in water with low oxygen.\\n\\nFrancis noted that there were some similarities between the new fish and the Australian lungfish, but he thought it was more likely to be related to the alligator gar of North America. It had the same type of scales as the alligator gar. He also noted that its duckbill rostrum resembled the rostrum of the American paddlefish, which is similarly shaped but even longer than the new fish\\u2019s, but that the rest of the new fish was very different from the paddlefish.\\n\\nFrancis described the new fish in 1879 and gave ...'