The South American lungfish is an extraordinary creature and a living fossil.
It is inhabiting slow-moving and stagnant waters in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, French Guiana and Paraguay.
It is the nearest living relative to the first land vertebrates and closely resembles its primordial ancestors dating back more than 400 million years.
This freshwater species (Lepidosiren paradoxa) also has the largest genome – all the genetic information of an organism – of any animal on the earth.
Its genome is to be about 30-times the size of the human genetic blueprint.
The length of the DNA in each cell of this lungfish would extend almost 60 metres.