This is Australian newspapers at their very best: over a century old and deep in the stomach of an enormous ocean fish.
Researchers at the Natural History Museum of London were restoring a stuffed 3m sunfish specimen, which was caught in Sydney Harbour in 1882, when they discovered a scrap of the The Sydney Morning Herald from January 26, 1883. How bloody ’bout it.
Here’s the fish on the day it was caught, on December 12, 1882. It is absolutely a very large fish.
wtf
It is rare for sunfish to be seen in harbours, which made its arrival in Sydney Harbour particularly unusal. Upon being taken from the harbour, it was stuffed and became part of the London museum’s collection. It’s apparently a little bit worse for wear these days, so a team was dedicated to restoring it.
During conservation the sunfish’s wheat straw stuffing was removed and replaced, leading to some unusual scenes pic.twitter.com/uZOWC2KwQO
— NaturalHistoryMuseum (@NHM_London) August 7, 2016
Nobody knows exactly how the Herald founds its way inside a stuffed sunfish, but there ya go. According to the SMH, the big news back on the halcyon day of January 26th, 1883 was a Test match and a tram line out to Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Coulda been bloody 2016 for all we know.
Source: SMH.
Photo: Twitter / Natural History Museum in London.
