The story of the discovery of the living

coelacanth (pronounced ‘seel-uh-kanth’)

captured the imagination of people

across the world.

This mysterious, yet now famous fish, is

also known as:

Old four legs : The living fossil : Old oily

one : Fossil Fish : Dinofish : the Fish that

Time Forgot : Christmas Fish : £100

Reward fish : Old Fourlegs : A Window to

the Past; a Door to the Future

And - of course - its scientific name

Latimeria chulumnae

The coelacanth is known in Indonesia as

“Raja laut”, the “King of the sea”, and in the

Comores as “Gombessa”. Other interesting native

names are “Fiandolo” or “Ghost fish”.

Paintings –(Top) King of the Sea (Below) Ghost Fishby Aidon Westcott

A LIVING FOSSIL?!

Called by skipper Hendrik

Goosen to look at a strange fish

in his catch on 24 December

1938, Marjorie Courtney-Latimer

suspected that the fish she was

looking at could be important for

science. Her keen observation, a

few words, a sketch and a letter

to a local fish expert resulted in

the zoological find of the 20th

century…

What did she see?

Colour dark grey black

“…my mind refuses to grasp this tremendous impossibility…”

“…It is curious that in spite of all this evidence, my intellect says that such things can’t happen.”

Pre-1938 – known to science only from the fossil record

1939-1952 – “A Man

Fishing”In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the

Sea, Santiago sees in the fish the qualities he values most–beauty, nobility, courage, calmness

and endurance: Santiago is not a fisherman –he is a man fishing.

Smith’s life’s obsession became to find another coelacanth – he had to wait 14 long years.

Eric Hunt loaded a coelacanth specimen into a box on his boat and telegraphed

Smith when fishermen in the Comores had told him where they found coelacanths

“It was a coelacanth all right;…as I caressed that fish…I was weeping, and was quite without shame. Fourteen of the best years of my life had gone in this search and it was true; it was really true. It had come at last.”

1952 – “Malania” Comores

• A live coelacanth photographed by Hans Fricke from the German submersible, Jago, off SodwanaBay in 2000 after a chance sighting by South African deep divers.

2000 – live coelacanths found in South Africa – an icon for marine research is born

“The public will only be interested if they are properly informed in the first place…” Prof Paul Skelton)

Building on a legacy of discovery - a South African firstUsing a remotely operated vehicle from the motor launch, Angra Pequena,

scientists on the African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme filmed live coelacanths at a depth of 109m off Sodwana Bay in May 2011.

The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/full/nature12027.html

2013 on – ‘a window to the past; a door to the future’.

Astronomy and clustering techniques used to recognise constellations of stars can be applied to identify individual coelacanths

(Rose Thorneycroft MSc thesis 2012)

Painting –Dissected &

Identified by

Aidon Westcott

Source material for this presentation:

Smith, JLB (1956) Old Fourlegs: The Story of the Coelacanth. London. Longman & Co.

Long, JA (1995) The Rise of Fishes – 500 million years of evolution. University of New South Wales Press,

Sydney. pp. 135-135; p.182.

Anderson, E (2005) Ichthos, issue 76, August 2005. Fossil Coelacanth identified. p.2.

Götz, A; Kerwath, S & Touflek, S (2010) Exploring the depths. Quest Vol. 6(4), pp. 28-30.

Thorneycroft, RE; Booth AJ (2012) Computer-aided identification of coelacnths, Latimeria Chulmnae,

using scale patterns. Marine Biology Research 8. pp 300-306.

Haworth, P (2012) Not so Set in Stone – Coelacanth, the fossil that really came to life. Quest Vol. 8(1),

pp16-20 .

Walker, Sally M (2002) Fossil Fish Found Alive: Discovering the Coelacanth. Carolrhoda Books, Inc.

Minneapolis

Websites:Coelacanth: The Fish Out of Time http://www.dinofish.comSouth Africa enters a new era of deep-sea research http://www.saiab.ac.za/newsitem.php?nid=67Aidon Westcott: http://www.aidonwestcott.co.za/

Photo credits:All photos © SAIAB unless otherwise stated

Penny Haworth www.saiab.ac.za