There are really no wonders in this world, do you believe it? In 2017, a fisherman in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan Province, accidentally caught a giant yellow snail while fishing at sea, and after 5 days, someone bid 220,000 yuan to buy the big yellow snail, and he actually refused to sell it.
Doesn't this sound a bit strange, but it really happened in reality, what the hell is going on? Let's take a look!
Cai Yuxin and the conch he captured
Cai Yuxin, a native of Taiwan Province of China, lives in Ziguan District, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan Province, and is an ordinary fisherman in Kaohsiung who usually fishes mainly off the coast of Kaohsiung Port.
At about 8:00 a.m. on January 8, 2017, Cai Yuxin sailed the boat to the sea outside Kaohsiung Port as usual for fishing operations, because there were no fish in the shallow sea area, so he once sank the fishing net to a depth of 150 to 160 meters, and after several hours of fishing, it gradually became better, and the fish caught were fat and abundant.
When dismantling the net to solve the fish, Cai Yuxin found a huge yellow conch in the mouth of the net, at that time he did not know what kind of conch it was, asked the old fishermen around, and everyone said that they did not know.
Cai Yuxin then took the conch to show the captain Jin Jinmao, and as a result, Jin Jinmao said that he had been fishing for more than 40 years, but he had never seen such a conch, and this time it was an eye-opener.
Cai Yuxin thought that this yellow conch was big and beautiful, so he planned to sell it with the catch, and later when the ship returned to the oyster fishing port, Cai Yuxin casually put the yellow conch on the fish stall to sell.
As a result, when selling, a female customer who came to buy fish kindly reminded him that this yellow conch was an extremely rare variety, and asked him to put it away and never sell it in the market, otherwise he would lose a lot.
After listening to the reminder from the female customer, Cai Yuxin hurriedly removed the yellow conch from the fish stall, and when he returned home, Cai Yuxin raised the conch in his own aquarium, and the next day, Cai Yuxin took the conch to contact Dr. Qiu Yuwen, a shellfish expert at the Pingtung Sea Life Museum.
Ryugu Ong Rong Conch
As a result, After taking a closer look at the conch, Dr. Qiu Yuwen told Cai Yuxin that the conch he captured was scientifically named Longgong Weng Rong Snail, which was the largest of the Weng Rong snails, the English name was Slit Shell, which means a cracked snail, and there was indeed a crack in the shell of the Weng Rong snail, and this crack was the channel for them to breathe and excrete.
Dragon Palace Weng Rong snail first appeared in the Cambrian period of the Paleozoic, dating back to more than half a billion years, because for a long time scientists have not found their traces, so once thought that this snail has become extinct, in the 90s of the last century began to have fishermen to find their traces, people know that they are not actually extinct.
Because the Dragon Palace Conch has evolved over hundreds of millions of years, they have preserved the shape of their ancestors and have hardly changed, so people also call them "living fossils".
Dr. Qiu Yuwen told Cai Yuxin that in recent years, the shellfish collection has formed a lot of history, the Dragon Palace Ong Rong snail is known as the king of shellfish, is one of the rarest and most precious conch species in the world, how rare is the Dragon Palace Ong Rong snail, in the 18th to 19th centuries, there have been biologists from all over the world have gone to the West Indies, South Africa and Central American waters to find more than a dozen kinds of live Ong Rong snails.
But only one Ongjong snail was preserved and sent to the Rotterdam Museum of Nature in the Netherlands, but since then, for nearly half a century, a second Ongjong snail has not been found in the world.
Cai Yuxin
At present, the total number of Ryugu Wengrong snails in museums around the world and in the hands of shellfish collectors is less than 300, which is the shellfish collection that shellfish collectors dream of getting.
On January 13, 2017, a wealthy businessman from Taipei found Cai Yuxin and offered NT$1 million to buy the Dragon Palace Weng Rong Snail, but Cai Yuxin directly refused after hearing it, saying that he did not intend to sell it to private sellers, and planned to get it for auction in Japan when the time came.
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