Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
13
SEARCH FOR A LIVING FOSSIL
A
LTHOUGH I DIDN'T KNOW
it when I took the job of curator, my ar-
rival at Steinhart couldn't have happened at a better time. John Mc-
Cosker had organized an expedition to the Indian Ocean to try and
capture a live coelacanth—the fulfillment, if successful, of Earl Her-
ald's dream. And of course, I would be going along.
The legendary coelacanth, known as a living fossil, has intrigued bi-
ologists the world over. The entire group, many examples of which ex-
ist in the fossil record, was believed to have died out seventy million
years ago. In 1938, however, a live, five-foot-long coelacanth was caught
o¤ the east coast of South Africa by a trawler. Since then a number of
them have been captured, almost all around the Comoro Islands north
of the island of Madagascar. The Comoros were believed to be the sole
location of the remaining population of coelacanths, but surprisingly,
in 1998 two of these remarkable, ancient fish were caught near Sulawesi,
Indonesia, one of which was even kept alive for a short while.
The living coelacanth is named
Latimeria,
after Ms. Courtney Lat-
imer of the East London Museum. Seeing the fish on the trawler, she
noticed a resemblance to the fossil fishes she had studied in her pale-
ontology topics. The fish, which appears to have changed little in three
hundred million years, possesses characteristic lobed fins with bony leg-
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