grounds for mosquitoes carrying malaria. Two men, Nathan Harrington and John Samuel Budgett, attempted to answer this question by making repeated expeditions to Africa. Harrington failed on his first attempt in 1898 and died early on his second in 1899 before he could reach his destination. Budgett failed in 1898/9, 1900, and 1902. He finally succeeded in 1903, but died of blackwater fever shortly after his return to England. He left excellent samples and drawings, but his only writing was a diary. Consequently, his results on Polypterus were written up and published by his friend John Graham Kerr. Drawing on this work, in 1907, E. S. Goodrich reported to the British Association the then current state of evidence 'against' Polypterus being a crossopterygian, placing it within the palaeoniscids, the most primitive actinopterygians. Much later, in 1946, Romer, confirmed this view, but he also wrote, "The weight of Huxley's [1861] opinion is a heavy one, and even today many a text continues to cite Polypterus as a crossopterygian and it is so described in many a classroom, although students of fish evolution have realized the falsity of this position for many years. ... Polypterus ... is not a crossopterygian, but an actinopterygian, and hence can tell us nothing about crossopterygian anatomy and embryology." Hall (2001), relying on Patterson (1982) and Noack et al. (1996), writes, "Phylogenetic analyses using both morphological and molecular data affirm Polypterus as a living stem actinopterygian." Research is ongoing. Most of the conclusions drawn by Kerr from Budgett's specimens have been confirmed, but many questions remain. Polypterus has rarely been bred in captivity. The first success was that of Polypterus senegalus by Arnoult in 1964, a species spawned repeatedly since (see Hartl, 1981; Bartsch and Gemballa, 1992; Bartsch et al., 1997 and Schugardt, 1997). Shortly after Arnoult's success, a second species, Polypterus ornatipinnis, was spawned by Armbrust for the first time (1966 and 1973) and bred subsequently by Azuma in 1986; Wolf, 1992; Bartsch and Britz, 1996. The third species successfully spawned in captivity was Polypterus endlicheri by Azuma in 1995. Zoo Basel have been successful in breeding Polypterus in captivity. In December 2005, several eggs were laid, and at the beginning of 2006, six young hatched. Within two months, they reached 10 cm (about 4 in). In 2014 researchers at McGill University (published in the journal Nature) turned to Polypterus to help show what might have