Living Fossil: The Story of the Coelacanth
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
"An engrossing tale of obsession, adventure and scientific reasoning." —Betty Ann Kevles, Los Angeles Times
In the winter of 1938, a fishing boat by chance dragged from the Indian Ocean a fish thought extinct for 70 million years. It was a coelacanth, which thrived concurrently with dinosaurs and pterodactyls—an animal of major importance to those who study the history of vertebrate life.
Living Fossil describes the life and habitat of the coelcanth and what scientists have learned about it during fifty years of research. It is an exciting and very human story, filled with ambitious and brilliant people, that reveals much about the practice of modern science.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1938 discovery of a strange, five-foot, 250-pound fish off the coast of South Africa excited the scientific community worldwide. Identified as Latimeria chalumnae , a coelacanth, the fish was previously known only in the fossil record of the Cretaceous period. In 1952 a second specimen was caught in the western Indian Ocean off the Comoro Islands, then a French territory. The authorities allowed only French scientists access to the fish, but after the islands' independence in the mid-'70s, the fish became more widely available for research. Thomson, director of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, studied the first fresh-frozen specimen and has written an intriguing biological detective story, tracing the coelacanth's morphology and biology, and placing it in the evolutionary scale. Illustrations.
