Bichir

The bichir is an elongated, armored freshwater fish native to tropical Africa's swampy floodplains, most notably the Nile system. Its body is covered in thick rhombic scales and carries a row of seven to eighteen small dorsal finlets rather than a single fin, along with fleshy, lobe-like pectoral fins. Paired lungs connected to its esophagus let it breathe surface air when the water it lives in runs low on oxygen. It is considered a sister lineage to all other modern ray-finned fish, a living branch of an evolutionary split more than 300 million years old.