A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth
On Sale: 08/19/2011
A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth
On Sale: 08/19/2011
Format:
About the Book
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.
Product Details
- ISBN: 9781857029079
- ISBN 10: 1857029070
- Imprint: Fourth Estate
- On Sale: 08/19/2011
- Pages: 256
- List Price:13.99 CAD
- BISAC1 : SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Zoology / Ichthyology & Herpetology
- BISAC2 : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Adventurers & Explorers
- BISAC3 : NATURE / Animals / Fish
- BISAC4 : NATURE / Animals / Birds
- BISAC5 : SCIENCE / Paleontology