Today’s prehistoric installment comes to us from just over 20 years ago, this image being taken on June 4th, 2004 – I could potentially line these up closer to the anniversaries (not perfectly, since the 4th was a Tuesday this year,) but I’m working from a spreadsheet that lists the first post they appeared in and has no image date info, and it’s not worth the effort. Plus I try to space out the birds and insects and so on.
This is a Florida gar (Lepisosteus platyrhincus,) and the only time that I’ve ever gotten photos of one, though I might have glimpsed said species here and there. This one was sitting on the bank of a drainage channel (closer to being a canal, really) behind where I lived, potentially caught by a fisherman and then discarded, though why they didn’t simply throw it back into the water escapes me. It was still alive and might potentially have leapt from the water itself, though it was a good two meters laterally and one vertically from the surface, so a damn good leap if so. Either way, I tossed it back into the water to terrify another day.
But this reminds me that it’s still been far too long since we’ve been to Florida, and no indications that this will be remedied soon. Sigh.