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.
| ISBN: | 9781857029079 |
| Publication date: | 19th August 2011 |
| Author: | Samantha Weinberg |
| Publisher: | 4th Estate an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 256 pages |
| Genres: |
Popular Science Evolution Marine biology Zoology: fishes (ichthyology) Biography: science, technology and medicine True stories of discovery History of science Palaeontology |