File:Single-Finned Lophius.jpg

English: Single-Finned Lophius

This depressed blackish lophius is the last thing in the box, awash and pickled in a thick glass bottle, slopping wanly, somehow forlorn of expression. Dubious lophius, inflated like bellows, suspended in perpetual death-throes. Nodder, let us have lateral, ventral and dorsal perspectives upon it, depicted size-of-nature. We’ll make two foldout plates for our sixth volume. Oh, and mix a little pink for where the mouth hangs open; that fish-white is far too corpselike for our subscribers.

Here – there’s a note. “Found washed-up, somewhat odorous, snagged in kelp.” Numerous teeth, tiny sharp. Nevertheless, the whole thing suggests something foetal. Hurry up.

Ah – look! The next chest is better: a falcon skin from Carolina. Lend me one of your lice. With some magnification, that will pad out this volume nicely, along with the grey baboon, medicinal leech, Fasciculated Ascdia, Peruvian Jay, Lumbriciform Lizard and that little Pyramidal Clio from the American Ocean. I’ll get Smith to shoot a Grey Wagtail for good measure. Enough, Nodder, I think we can say that the depressed Lophius is well and truly painted.

Poem by Giles Watson, s014. Picture: NM, Volume 6. Shaw was deeply confused by this specimen, tentatively concluding that it was a species of Monkfish or Anglerfish, but theorising that it could be “the foetus of any of the Trichechi” – apparently a reference to the Walrus. It was not until 1940 that Gilbert Percy Whitley correctly identified Shaw’s “Lophius” as a Coffin Ray (Hypnos monopterygius), a species of electric ray which is quite common in Australian inshore waters. The ray had by that stage already been described by the French zoologist Auguste Duméril in 1852. Once they have been stranded, the bodies of coffin-rays rapidly become bloated; this was clearly what threw Shaw so far off course. See Brian Saunders, Discovery of Australia's Fishes: A History of Australian Ichthyology to 1930, CSIRO, 2012, p. 14.