In the year 1497 a giant ‘Jack-killer’ was captured in the vicinity of Mannheim, with the following announcement in Greek appended to his muzzle: — ‘I am the first fish that was put into this pond by the hands of the Emperor Frederic the Second, on this 3rd day of October, 1262.’ The age of the informant, therefore, if his lips spoke truth (and the unprecedented dimensions of the body left little doubt on that point), was more than two hundred and thirty-five years. Already he had been the survivor of many important changes in the political and social world around, and would have swam out of perhaps as many more had the captors been as solicitous to preserve his life as they were to take his portrait. This, on the demise of the original, was hung up in the castle of Lautern, and the enormous carcase (which, when entire, weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, and measured nineteen feet) was sent to the museum at Mannheim, where, deprived of its flesh, and caparisoned de novo, it hung, and haply yet hangs, a light desiccated skeleton, which a child might move.

— Edmund Fillingham King, Ten Thousand Wonderful Things, 1860