May 15, 2026
2 min read
Meet the tiny fish that looks like Mr. SnuffleupagusA strange, tiny fish that resembles the famous Sesame Street character camouflages amid red algae thanks to its flamboyant reddish “hairs”
By Meghan Bartels edited by Andrea Thompson
Scientist David Harasti first saw the species now formally identified as Solenostomus snuffleupagus in 2003 in Papua New Guinea.
For decades a tiny fish haunted marine biologist David Harasti. During a dive off Papua New Guinea in 2003, he caught a glimpse of something red and shockingly hairy and immediately knew it was something scientists hadn’t yet described. But from there, things got trickier: during six more visits, he couldn’t find it again. It took enlisting Great Barrier Reef divers and scouring the shelves of the Australian Museum to determine that the fish wasn’t imaginary. Finally, scientists have confirmed the new species—and enshrined it in the annals of science as Solenostomus snuffleupagus, a nod to its remarkable resemblance to Big Bird’s beloved friend.
“It was so easy to say, ‘Yeah, this looks like Snuffleupagus.’ I mean, it’s almost identical. It’s scary,” says Graham Short, an ichthyologist and taxonomist at the California Academy of Sciences and the Australian Museum, who, with Harasti, wrote the paper formally describing the new species. “We may have had a few drinks and decided to e-mail Sesame Street Australia. And they answered the following day!”
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