ALIEN ZOO NEWS FROM THE CRYPTOZOOLOGICAL GARDEN

THIRD COELACANTH SPECIES?

ne of the greatest zoological discoveries in modern times occurred on 22 December 1938, when a living coelacanth was captured off South Africa. Until that momentous day, this distinctive lineage of lobe-finned fishes was known to science only from ancient fossils that even pre-dated those of the last dinosaurs, being more than 65 million years old. Consequently, the South African revelation that somehow, against all the odds, coelacanths had survived ichthyologically incognito right into the present in 1939. Moreover, history repeated itself less than 60 years later when in 1997 a second living coelacanth species was discovered, this time existing in waters off the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (Celebes), which was formally dubbed in 1999. (Incidentally, it’s worth noting that although hitherto unknown to zoologists, both species had long been familiar to the fishing communities in their respective regions, who even had local names for them.)