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Longnose Gar — printable fact sheet
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Longnose Gar
Lepisosteus osseus
Lepisosteus osseus is a living relic, a fish whose lineage goes back over 100 million years and whose armour is genuinely archaic: it is covered in ganoid scales, rigid, interlocking, diamond-shaped plates coated in a hard enamel-like layer of ganoine, forming a flexible chain m…
Did you know?
- Longnose Gar can leap out of the water to escape predators or catch prey, using their powerful tails.
- Gars can breathe air well enough to survive in a bucket for hours, and they must surface periodically even in well-oxygenated water. The toxin in gar eggs is not destroyed by cooking, and the flesh itself is perfectly good eating. The alligator gar, a relative, is the largest of the family and was targeted for eradication by state agencies well into the twentieth century before being recognised as a native predator worth conserving.
What I learned
Draw the longnose gar
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