Why Fish Don't Exist

the long version

When Lulu Miller was starting out as a science reporter, she encountered a story that would stick with her for a decade. It was the strange story of a 19th-century scientist named David Starr Jordan, who set out to discover all the world’s fish. Decade by decade, he built one of the most important fish collections ever seen. Until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake hit—sending thousands of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was s