Physical Appearance
The white sturgeon has a slender, long body, head and mouth. This fish has no scales; instead it has large bony scutes that serve as a form of armor. There are 11–14 dorsal scutes, all anterior to the dorsal fin, and 38–48 lateral scutes and 9–12 ventral scutes on each side. The dorsal color of a white sturgeon is gray, pale olive, or gray-brown. The fins are a dusky, opaque gray. The underside is a clean white. It has four barbels, used for sensing food, near its huge toothless mouth.
Sturgeons are classified as a bony fish, but actually are more cartilaginous than bony, their internal bone structure being more like a shark’s. Sturgeon have changed very little since they first appeared, over 175 million years ago and thus have the appearance of a very ancient fish.
Read more about this topic: White Sturgeon
Famous quotes related to physical appearance:
“Even the simple act that we call ‘going to visit a person of our acquaintance’ is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)