The dolphin recently completed an undergraduate qualification in the History of Art at London's Courtauld Institute of Art and is believed to be the first marine cetacean mammal to gain a first class honours degree. 

Asked by Artnose why the fund had decided to train a dolphin to search for blue-chip fine art, the fund's administrator said: "Well, most fine art investment managers are basically glorified accountants and know nothing about art and so they can't be given responsibility for making sound judgments on aesthetic grounds. The dolphin has a highly developed sense of colour, line and form and is basically more reliable than your average investment manager. Hence the decision to employ him."

'Dunlop' the Dolphin has already identified a superb Meindert Hobbema in an English private collection and an important Paulus Potter Landscape with Cattle, that came up at a provincial auction room incorrectly catalogued as by Thomas Sidney Cooper. He is also believed to be in tight negotiations over a possible School of Rembrandt oil, Study of a Woman, in a Belgian corporate collection.

Dolphins are significantly less expensive to employ than most art consultants who charge astronomical annual fees for their services to investment funds. 'Dunlop' does not require five-course lunches at the Ivy and runs no onerous expense account. He is said to be happy with a herring and a hoop to jump through.

City analysts believe more fund managers may begin employing marine mammals as the credit squeeze tightens. One auction house is training a shark to conduct contemporary art auctions. "Why pay a fortune to a human shark when you can have a real one at a fraction of the cost?" said one insider.

Flipper Coyne