The Man Who Swims With Coelacanths

[n2doc]

By Brandon Keim May 26, 2011 | 4:39 pm | Categories: Animals


More than seven decades later, the words have the same urgency as when they rolled off Marjorie Courtinay-Latimer’s telegraph machine and into history:

MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS = FISH DESCRIBED.

Courtinay-Latimer was the young curator of a natural history museum on South Africa’s east coast. The message came from J.L.B. Smith, an icthyologist to whom she’d turned when, shortly before Christmas in 1938, local fishermen brought her a fish unlike any they’d ever seen.

Caught at a depth of 240 feet, it was five feet long, covered in bony scales and had fins reminiscent of legs. Courtinay-Latimer immediately sent a sketch to Smith, who thought it looked like a coelacanth. There was just one catch: Coelacanths were extinct, and had been for 70 million years.


more
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/hans-fricke/

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Book rec -- "A Fish Caught In Time"

http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780060932855-0

[closeupready]

2. Gorgeous colors - thanks for posting.

K&R

[Tuesday Afternoon]

3. thanks for posting this. interesting.

[mimitabby]

4. more sad news..