FISH EXHIBITS IN THE AMERICAN MUSEUM 



By Bashford Dean 



IT is an open question to what degree 

 the Hfe-habits of fishes should be 

 pictured in an elaborate way in the 

 Museum's present gallery of fishes, 

 for space is limited and such "habitat 

 groups" occup3^ many cubic feet. It is 

 clear, too, that they are subsidiary to 

 other types of exhibits, thus, the princi- 

 pal kinds of fishes must be shown as 

 casts, alcoholic specimens or stuffed, and 

 there must be models and preparations 

 to illustrate how fishes move, breathe, 

 and have their being generally, how they 

 reproduce their kind, how they may be 

 curiously adapted to living in shallows, 

 surf, the depths of the sea, on land, and 

 even flying in the air, how they change 

 colors when they sleep, or when chame- 

 leon-like, the}^ adjust themselves to their 

 surroundings. All exhibits of the latter 

 types may be developed attractively on 

 a fairly small scale, and will interest and 

 teach the average visitor to the Museum, 

 and will satisfy as well a need of the 

 serious reader of zoology. 



Great habitat groups, on the other 

 hand, are elaborate exhibits with painted 

 backgrounds, artificial plants and rocks 

 and "effects" which entail much time 

 to construct, great expense, and infinite 

 pains to supervise and execute. The 

 results, it is true, are apt to give an 

 impressive and accurate picture of cer- 

 tain phases in the life of fishes, and are 

 certainly a definite and aesthetic means 

 of attracting the visitor to a more care- 

 ful study of neighboring exhibits, whet- 

 ting his appetite ,for a more serious 

 zoological diet, so to speak. Still, even 

 at the best, the habitat groups of fishes 

 are not to be compared with those of 

 mammals, birds or reptiles, for fishes 

 are least suited structurally to the art 



of the taxidermist or of the modeler. 

 Scales and fins shrink, colors fade, and 

 the mounted fish, no matter what its 

 pose, appears only too often as a dead 

 fish, opaque and leaden. It follows 

 therefore, that with our technical meth- 

 ods, extensive fish groups can hardly be 

 expected to rival the tanks of an aqua- 

 rium. 



In our present gallery accordingly, 

 it has been the aim to show larger habitat 

 groups only in those instances where the 

 fishes form important links in the chain 

 of the backboned animals, and touch the 

 broader phases of natural history, espe- 

 cially from the viewpoints of structure 

 and descent. In such cases too, the 

 effort has been to demonstrate essential 

 habits or interesting facts concerning 

 their breeding or development. Thus, 

 the lowly lampreys are represented in a 

 group which shows such details as 

 swimming, excavating their nest and 

 depositing their eggs. And the ganoids 

 are now pictured in four larger groups. 

 For the ganoids are the few survivors of 

 one of the great divisions of fishes in 

 early geological times, and formed the 

 evolutional bridge which connected the 

 primitive sharks on the one hand with 

 lungfishes, and on the other with the 

 bony fishes, which form perhaps over 

 ninety-nine per cent of all living fishes. 

 In these four habitat groups, the first 

 pictures the shovel-nosed sturgeon, which 

 still occurs in the Mississippi and its 

 tributaries, and is to be regarded as the 

 least modified of all living ganoids. 

 The second shows the spoonbill sturgeon, 

 which, on the contrary, is the most 

 highly modified member of the ancient 

 stock. This eccentric sturgeon has sur- 

 vived only in this country and in China, 



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