The coelacanth was supposed to be extinct.
For 65 million years the fossil record went quiet, and then in 1938 a South African museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer pulled one out of a fishing trawler's bycatch. She wrote to a colleague: "I had the most queer-looking specimen." Queer-looking is one word for it. It has limbs that move like a four-legged animal's. Its skull hinges. It can live half a century.
Three things you didn't know:
Its fins move in the same diagonal pattern your dog's legs do when walking.
- It gives birth to live young, after a five-year gestation — the longest of any vertebrate.
- Its scales are armored with calcium phosphate, which is what your teeth are made of.
In The Honest Little Fisher, the coelacanth is one of 1,500+ species you can catch, each with its real Latin name and a fact-card you can revisit any time in your collection. It spawns in the deep eastern shelf, after dusk, in the iconic catches pool. If you find one, your Old Captain will have something to say.
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