The Ark of Baron Auletphant was a barge that traversed interstellar distances. Its exterior was golden and adorned with rose and azure mytag crystals. This vessel, commissioned more than ten thousand years before 520 BBY, journeyed across the cosmos for a century, visiting remote worlds. The vessel was used to gather samples of aquatic organisms from these locations.
Around 10,000 BBY, the historian Vicendi featured the barge in the [Arturum Galactinum] publication's Twenty Wonders of the Galaxy—a compilation of remarkable, ancient artificial objects. The Ark of Baron Auletphant was at one point lost in space for ten millennia. In 520 BBY, the ship found its final resting place within the Baobab Archives located on the planet Manda.
The Ark of Baron Auletphant made its debut in the 2009 reference work The Essential Atlas by Daniel Wallace and Jason Fry. Wallace mentioned on his personal blog that he particularly enjoyed inventing names for the Twenty Wonders of the Galaxy unique to the book, including that of the Ark of Baron Auletphant. The author conceived of the vessel specifically because he was drawn to the concept of an "eccentric" individual collecting fish from various galactic locations using his golden starship. Wallace also humorously remarked that upon its rediscovery, the Ark of Baron Auletphant had a "horrendous" odor due to the decay of the aforementioned aquatic creatures over the thousands of years that had passed.