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The smallist fish has relatives

Peat bog swimmer Paedocypris is the world’s smallest fish, and the smallest vertebrate too. Today, the Natural History Museum of London figured out who its closest relatives are. (Zsa Zsa’s husband wasn’t on the list, rimshot) Most of the cousins live in peat bogs too. The thing doesn’t even have a skull — the brain just protrudes from its head like the aliens in Invaders from Mars.

Second in line as smallest fish is the male of a small deep sea angler, Photocorynus spiniceps. The female gets to a respectable 50 mm, making the 6 mm male look like a parasite. I hope she has a good personality, because she is extraordinarily homely.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 7:35 pm and is filed under News, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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3 Responses to “The smallist fish has relatives”

Matt Stafford Says:
April 19th, 2007 at 8:11 am
That angler is one ugly fish.
sjb Says:
April 20th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Wow, I was thinkin, how ugly can a fish be? That is homely for sure.
rajbott Says:
April 23rd, 2007 at 3:22 pm
thanks! This is muuuch more rss friendly!

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Author

I'm Michael Condouris, and this is my second blog. The first one's Wacky Neighbor. I was born in 1975 in New Jersey. I live in Aberdeen, NJ, with my fiancée Carrie, in our new suburban paradise. We have two pets, a Shih Tzu named Coco and a beagledor named Zoë. I was on Jeopardy once. I lost, though, just like in the Weird Al song.

Besides Smallistry, my interests include robots, space, movies, movies about robots and/or space, and Mexican restaurants. Recently I've also become fond of the Wii and ancient history. I dislike conversations about food, sports, other people's children, and conspiracy theories. I'm ok with talking about the weather though. My hat size is 7 1/4, and I have no sense of smell.

I've pretty much stopped blogging in the last, oh, 6 months or so, because talking about tiny things got a bit stale and life had a habit of getting in the way. So for the time being, the site will live on as a Twitter feed of whatever floats through my head.