How do you find an elusive animal that most people have never even seen dead in a fish market? Matthew McDavitt, above, knows how.Melody Robbins This story was originally published by Hakai Magazine and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Peter Kyne sits down at his desk to write a eulogy for a fish he's never met. No scientist has seen signs of the critically endangered Rhynchobatus cooki, or clown wedgefish, since a dead one turned up at a fish market in 1996. Kyne, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University in Australia who studies wedgefish, has worked only with preserved specimens of the spotted sea creature. "This thing's dust," Kyne thinks, feeling defeated as he writes the somber news in a draft assessment of the global conservation status of wedgefish species for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Wedgefish are a type of ray.