The reconstruction of a jawless ancient fish has become a social media phenomenon in Japan.
The Helsinki Natural History Museum is gathering attention on Japanese social media. Henri Kärkkäinen
The ancient fish on display in the Helsinki Natural History Museum is gaining huge popularity on social media.
The reconstruction of Muinaiskala has been seen by more than 120 million people on Twitter, and the original picture has received more than 300,000 likes.
The original tweet has already been reshared nearly 80,000 times. In addition, there is a large number of memes and self-made content shared by people with the Latin name of the fish.
Luumus’ public affairs manager Sanna Vuori is embarrassed by the popularity.
– It’s nice that people are interested in such things. It’s quite special and exciting that something can become such a phenomenon on the other side of the world.
Vuori says that he has seen some of the memes published on social media. Sacabambaspis janvieri -the popularity of memes created from fish affects the personal appearance of the fish based on it. Vuori says that at Luumus, the matter aroused reflection.
– Somewhere in the comments it was mentioned that the fish looks miserable. We wonder if the fish’s miserable expression is perhaps wrong for the current scientific view of its appearance. It’s hard to say for sure, but views haven’t changed significantly in recent years.