‘Meet Aenigmachanna gollum, a 100 million-year-old fish that looks like a dragon and swims like an eel.
After remaining hidden for a hundred million years, the fish was discovered in the watery underground rocks of Kerala and has been named “Gollum”, after the dark and conflicted character of JRR Tolkien’s epic saga ‘Lord of the Rings’.
The Gollum belongs to an old family of fish, called dragon snakeheads, which retains its primitive characteristics after all these millennia. As per the researchers, it also survived the separation of India and Africa around 120 million years ago.
Interestingly, it is likely that the Gollum would have remained unknown for longer without the power of social media.
At the beginning of 2018, Rajeev Raghavan, a fish researcher at Kerala University of Fisheries and Ocean Studies and co-author of the present study, saw a post on social media of a curious fish that a person had found in a well in the backyard. He could not recognise the creature and emailed the picture to fellow researcher Ralf Britz, who couldn’t understand it either.
Raghavan and his colleagues started to collect more specimens of the fish for a scientific study that would bring Britz all the way to India. Then, in a flooded paddy field in Kochi, Britz would see the elusive fish rise to the surface late one night.
And so the Gollum was first identified as a new species and genus in May 2019 in a study published in Zootaxa.
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