barramunda

/ ˌbærəˈmʌndə /

noun

1. the edible Australian lungfish, Neoceratodus forsteri , having paddle-like fins and a long body covered with large scales

Word History and Origins

Origin of barramunda¹

from a native Australian language

Example Sentences

These must all have been of similar structure and habits with126 the Barramunda, which is thus the sole survivor, perhaps itself verging on extinction, of a group of herbivorous fishes introduced, it may be, contemporaneously with the first stream affording the requisite vegetable food, and which have continued almost without improvement or deterioration to the present time.

From Project Gutenberg

The Siberian meadows would have sent us that intermediate creature which Prjevalsky recognises as the half-way house between the horses and the donkeys; the rivers of Queensland would have disclosed to our view that strange lung-bearing and gill-breathing barramunda, in which Günther discerns the missing link between the ganoid fishes on the one hand, and the mudfish and salamandroid amphibians on the other.

From Project Gutenberg

Imagine the extinct animals of the Crystal Palace grounds suddenly appearing to our dazzled eyes in a tropical ramble, and you can faintly conceive the delight and astonishment of naturalists at large when the barramunda first 'swam into their ken' in the rivers of Queensland.

From Project Gutenberg

To be sure, in size and shape this 'extinct fish,' still living and grunting quietly in our midst, is comparatively insignificant beside the 'dragons of the prime' immortalised in a famous stanza by Tennyson: but, to the true enthusiast, size is nothing; and the barramunda is just as much a marvel and a monster as the Atlantosaurus himself would have been if he had suddenly walked upon the stage of time, dragging fifty feet of lizard-like tail in a train behind him.

From Project Gutenberg

The unsophisticated aborigines knew it as barramunda; the almost equally ignorant white settlers called it with irreverent and unfilial contempt the flat-head.

From Project Gutenberg