You will hear part of a further education marine biology lecture.

Good morning everyone and welcome to this further education lecture on marine biology. Today we are going to look at the coelacanth . The discovery of the coelacanth has been compared to finding a dinosaur walking around today over 85 million years after it went extinct.

The story began a few days before Christmas in 1938 when the first living coelacanth was discovered off the east coast of South Africa, at the mouth of the Chalumna River. The fish was caught in a shark gill net by captain Goosen and his crew who, recognising the bizarrenature of their catch, alerted the local museum in the small South African town of East London.

The Director of the East London Museum at the time was Miss Marjorie Courtney-Latimer after whom the Coelacanth was eventually named. Miss Courtney-Latimer offered bounties to fishermen for unfamiliar fish. It was Miss Courtney-Latimer who alerted the prominentSouth African exci Dr J.L.B. Smith, who initially identified the fish, and subsequentlyinformed the world about this amazing discovery. This first coelacanth led to the discovery of the first documented population, off the remote Comoros Islands, between the mainland of Africa and madagascar . For 60 years this was presumed to be the only coelacanth population in existence .

Originally it was a concern that the Coelacanth might have a very limited range and that over fishing along the Comoros Islands might wipe it out. However, scientists were amazed when, on july the 30th 1998 , an American scientist discovered a Coelacanth population in Indonesia. Dr. Mark Erdmann was on a honeymoon trip to the area investigating a coral reef research site when he spotted a strange fish being wheeled into the fish market. He recognized the fish as a coelacanth and snapped a picture before it was sold.

Dr. Erdmann’s subsequent research revealed that the people from Sulawesi had a name for it, raja, ‘king of the sea’. The Sulawesi coelacanth colony is about 10,000 kilometers east of where the Coelacanths were previously known to occur in the Western Indian Ocean.

Both Sulawesi and Comoros coelacanths are quite different from all other living fish. But perhaps the most interesting feature of the Coelacanth is that it has paired, lobed fins, which move in a similar fashion to our arms and legs. Coelacanths also have an extra lobe on their tail and a vertebral column that is not fully developed. They are the only living animal to have a fully functional inter-cranial joint, a division that separates the ear and brain from the nasal organs and eye, and allows the front part of the head to be lifted when the fish is feeding. The brown Sulawesi coelacanth and the steel blue Comoros shared share these unusual characteristics.

The discovery of the Coelacanth in 1938 is still considered to be the zoological find of the century. This living fossil comes from a lineage of fish that was thought to have been extinct since the time of the dinosaurs. Coelacanths are known from the fossil record dating back over 360 million years, and peaked in abundance about 240 million years ago. Before 1938 they were believed to have become extinct approximately 80 million years ago, after mysteriously disappearing from the fossil record.

How could the Coelacanth disappear for over 80 million years and then turn up alive and well in the 20th century? The answer seems to be that fossil Coelacanths appeared to live in environments with clay sedimentation with plenty of volcanic activity. Modern coelacanths, both in the Comoros and Sulawesi inhabit caves and overhangs in vertical marine reefs, at about 200 metres , environments not conducive to fossil creation.

In 1991 scientists got a better understanding of the fish when the Comoros got their independence from France and French restrictions on research were lifted. This allowed scientists to study the fish off the Comoros Islands. As the animal hides in underwater caves some 300 to 700 feet down during the day and comes out at night to feed, diving is not an option and previously only fisherman specimens had been available for study. But this time the scientists had their own submarine so they could study the coelacanth in its natural habitat through portholes .