Atlantic cod text from the reference. Atlantic cod The Atlantic cod ("Gadus morhua") is a benthopelagic fish of the family Gadidae, widely consumed by humans. It is also commercially known as cod or codling. Dry cod may be prepared as unsalted stockfish, as cured salt cod or clipfish. In the western Atlantic Ocean, cod has a distribution north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and around both coasts of Greenland and the Labrador Sea; in the eastern Atlantic, it is found from the Bay of Biscay north to the Arctic Ocean, including the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, Sea of the Hebrides, areas
Sacred Cod seals, and insignia such as the early crest of the "Salem Gazette". In 1743 a prominent Salem businessman built a mansion in which "the end of every stair in his spacious hall [displayed] a carved and gilded codfish." In the late 1920s an "amusing" (as H. P. Lovecraft termed it) codfish emblem appeared briefly, "totem-like", on Massachusetts license plates. What is now called the Sacred Cod has hung for three centuriesthough with interruptions, and in at least two (and possibly three) successive incarnationsin the chamber of the Massachusetts House of Representatives (or its predecessor, the House of Assembly of the