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A fish caught in time : the search for the coelacanth

Weinberg, Samantha, 1966-2000
Books, Manuscripts
A Fish Caught in Time is the story of the most rare fish in the world. The coelacanth was believed to be the first fish to crawl from the sea and evolve into reptiles, mammals and eventually humankind. 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.
Imprint:
London : Fourth Estate, 2000.
Collation:
256p. : ill. ; 20 cm.
Notes:
Originally published: 1999.
ISBN:
9781857029079 (pbk)
Dewey class:
597.39
Language:
English
BRN:
2517805
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