A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth

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.

Title - A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth

Edition -

Author - Samantha Weinberg

ISBN 13 - 9781857029079

Imprint - 4th Estate

Publisher - HarperCollins Publishers

Date Published - 04/05/2000

Prize -

No. of pages -

Binding Type - Paperback

Dimensions - 129 x 198 x 15mm

Weight - 207 g

Languages - English