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.
A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth
#ad
Author: Weinberg, Samantha
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9781857029079
Details:
Author: Weinberg, Samantha
Brand: Fourth Estate
Binding: Paperback
Number Of Pages: 256
Release Date: 15-05-2000
Part Number: (30 integrated b/w)
Package Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.0 x 0.8 inches Languages: English
EAN: 9781857029079
