Most fish use gills to obtain oxygen from water, but lungfish actually have lungs that allow them to breathe air. They can survive during periods when their watery homes dry up.
Young African and South American lungfish have external gills, just like young tadpoles. This means that they were once thought to be amphibians rather than fish. Lungfish are the only surviving descendants of a very ancient family of fish whose fossilized remains date back over 400 million years. At that time, there were at least 100 different types. Today there are just six. Fossils have shown that the Australian lungfish has remained unchanged in appearance for over 100 million years.The ancestors of this
