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A Fish Caught in Time, The Search for the Coelacanth
by Samantha Weinberg
- SCIENCE
- 2000
- PAPER
- 220 PAGES
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PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION
Somebody ought to make a movie out of the discovery of the coelacanth. It's an improbable tale, rich in incident, personality and politics. Weinberg traces the history of the lobe-finned fish from its original description by Louis Agassiz in the 1830s to the recent surprise discovery of a population of old four legs in Indonesia. The discovery of the five-foot fish, long thought extinct, off the South African coast in 1938 electrified the scientific community -- and spurred many efforts to bring one back alive. Most of the subsequent specimens have been found off the Comoro Islands in the Mozambique Channel. Take this book along if you are heading to the Comoros, or just have an interest in well told tale of evolutionary history. Keith Stewart Thomson provides more detail on the evolutionary significance of the coelacanth in his classic "Living Fossil: The Story of the Coelacanth" (BST09).
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