There were Coelacanths swimming around in the oceans in the Devonian period. That was over 400 million years ago. Research on fossil Coelacanths shows that the genus changed very little over time. The majority of Coelacanth species lived 140 million years later, during the Triassic period. They all died out 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous, the time of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. At least …. that’s what everybody thought.
And then, in 1938, a fisherman in South Africa suddenly brought up a living Coelacanth.
The strange fish was taken to Miss Courtenay Latimer, a curator at the East London Museum in South Africa. She couldn’t identify it but sent a sketch with a rough description to a fish specialist. There was huge excitement and telexes rattled out the news all over the world. A fossil fish was back from the dead! A creature that everyone had thought long extinct was still alive and flipping!