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logo 11/26/2024 3:30:48 PM     
Blood-sucking fish in its own league 
NZ Source: odt 12/12/2022
Blood-sucking fish in its own league
Credit: Jonah Yick
Back in 1135, King Henry I of England, youngest son of William the Conqueror, famously died of "a surfeit of lampreys". Generations of schoolchildren have puzzled over just what this phrase meant. Did he really eat too many eels?!
 

In short, no: it may well have been food poisoning rather than a fishy excess that carried off the king. Moreover, lampreys may seem at first glance to look like eels, but they are as evolutionarily distant from eels as they are from us mammals (see the diagram of their evolutionary tree below).

 
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