A Fish Caught in Time

The Search for the Coelacanth

By: Samantha Weinberg

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Paperback | 4 May 2000

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Paperback
256 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
14.0 x 19.0 x 1.6

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A gripping story of obsession, adventure and the search for our oldest surviving ancestor - 400 million years old - a four-limbed dinofish!

In 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young South African museum curator, caught sight of a specimen among a fisherman's trawl that she knew was special. With limb-like protuberances culminating in fins the strange fish was unlike anything she had ever seen. The museum board members dismissed it as a common lungfish, but when Marjorie eventually contacted Professor JLB Smith, he immediately identified her fish as a coelacanth - a species known to have lived 400 million years ago, and believed by many scientists to be the evolutionary missing link - the first creature to crawl out of the sea. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had thus made the century's greatest zoological discovery. But Smith needed a live or frozen specimen to verify the discovery, so began his search for another coelacanth, to which he devoted his life.

Industry Reviews

In 1938, a young female museum curator from South Africa made a startling discovery in a fisherman's catch: a primitive, ancient five-foot-long, steely-blue fish of the deep that became the 'scientific find of the century'. She managed to save only skin and a few bones but from these tantalizing clues and a sketch, the fish was correctly identified as a coelacanth and so began a 14-year search for a fresh, complete specimen. This true tale of the sea carries into the present day with the recent discovery of coelacanths in Indonesian waters. Destined to become a classic, this is a beautifully written, designed and produced book - a wonderful gift. (Kirkus UK)

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