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

Weinberg, Samantha; Fourth Estate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060194952 ISBN 13: 9780060194956

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2000

Synopsis

Just before Christmas in 1938, the young woman curator of a small South African museum spotted a strange-looking fish on a trawler's deck. It was five feet long, with steel-blue scales, luminescent eyes and remarkable limb-like fins, unlike those of any fish she had ever seen. Determined to preserve her unusual find, she searched for days for a way to save it, but ended up with only the skin and a few bones.

A charismatic amateur ichthyologist, J.L.B. Smith, saw a thumbnail sketch of the fish and was thunderstruck. He recognized it as a coelacanth (pronounced see-la-kanth), a creature known from fossils dating back 400 million years and thought to have died out with the dinosaurs. With its extraordinary limbs, the coelacanth was believed to be the first fish to crawl from the sea and evolve into reptiles, mammals and eventually mankind. The discovery was immediately dubbed the "greatest scientific find of the century."

Smith devoted his life to the search for a complete specimen, a fourteen-year odyssey that culminated in a dramatic act of international piracy. As the fame of the coelacanth spread, so did rumors and obsessions. Nations fought over it, multimillion-dollar expeditions were launched, and submarines hand-built to find it. In 1998, the rumors and the truth came together in a gripping climax, which brought the coelacanth back into the international limelight.

A Fish Caught in Time is the entrancing story of the most rare and precious fish in the world--our own great uncle forty million times removed.

About this title

About the Author

Samantha Weinberg is a British writer and traveler. She has reported from the four corners of the world for American, African, and European newspapers and magazines. She divides her time between her suitcase and a thatched cottage in Wiltshire, England.

From the Back Cover

Just before Christmas in 1938, the young woman curator of a small South African museum spotted a strange-looking fish on a trawler's deck. It was five feet long, with steel-blue scales, luminescent eyes and remarkable limb-like fins, unlike those of any fish she had ever seen. Determined to preserve her unusual find, she searched for days for a way to save it, but ended up with only the skin and a few bones.

A charismatic amateur ichthyologist, J.L.B. Smith, saw a thumbnail sketch of the fish and was thunderstruck. He recognized it as a coelacanth (pronounced see-la-kanth), a creature known from fossils dating back 400 million years and thought to have died out with the dinosaurs. With its extraordinary limbs, the coelacanth was believed to be the first fish to crawl from the sea and evolve into reptiles, mammals and eventually mankind. The discovery was immediately dubbed the "greatest scientific find of the century."

Smith devoted his life to the search for a complete specimen, a fourteen-year odyssey that culminated in a dramatic act of international piracy. As the fame of the coelacanth spread, so did rumors and obsessions. Nations fought over it, multimillion-dollar expeditions were launched, and submarines hand-built to find it. In 1998, the rumors and the truth came together in a gripping climax, which brought the coelacanth back into the international limelight.

A Fish Caught in Time is the entrancing story of the most rare and precious fish in the world--our own great uncle forty million times removed.

Reviews

Scientists had believed that coelacanths, five-foot-long fish with surprisingly limblike fins, existed on earth for approximately 330 million years, from 400 million years ago until they went extinct about 70 million years ago. To the world's surprise, however, a live one was discovered off the coast of South Africa in 1938. Here, British writer Weinberg presents a breezy, engaging account (previously published in the U.K.) of this "living fossil," from the time it was first described in fossil form by the great paleontologist Louis Agassiz in 1839, to its rediscovery 100 years later, to the present. Because coelacanths had been presumed extinct for so long, because modern individuals appear so little changed from their fossilized relatives and because morphologically they appear to be an evolutionary link between fish and reptiles, perhaps on the path leading to humans, they have a great deal to tell the scientific community. Weinberg, while not focusing on the science, provides enough information to give nontechnical readers a flavor for the biological issues surrounding this primitive group of fish. Otherwise, she features the people most involved with rediscovering and studying coelacanths, as well as the national and scientific rivalries arising from the fish's fame. Filled with b&w photos, this book should appeal not only to cryptozoologists and naturalists, but to anyone interested in the living evolutionary record. Agent, Gillon Aitken. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In 1938, the young curator of a small museum in the South African town of East London discovered a bizarre fish in the midst of some specimens a trawler captain had saved for her. Unable to identify the five-foot fish, which had strange lobed fins and a tail unlike any other, curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer wrote to her friend, amateur ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith, and enclosed a sketch of her find. What happened next is the stuff of scientific legend--the fish was a coelacanth, a species believed to be extinct for 70 million years. The ensuing scientific uproar, not to mention the race for further specimens, has lasted ever since. Weinberg covers the scientific debates over the place of the coelacanth in evolution (is it the direct ancestor of the first land animals, crawling from the sea on its four lobed fins?), the race among ichthyologists to describe and film further specimens, and the bombshell in 1998 when another type of coelacanth was discovered in Indonesia. Firsthand accounts from coelacanth researchers, particularly from the 90-year-old Courtenay-Latimer, enliven the text, and the inclusion of photographs and drawings not published elsewhere reveal the excitement caused by this living fossil. Deserving of classic status in the genre of popular writing about science, this story of the coelacanth belongs in all libraries. Nancy Bent

In 1938, a fish believed to be extinct for 70 million years was caught off the South African coast, triggering the "greatest scientific find of the century." The search for the coelacanth, the first fish thought to have crawled from the ocean to land, is a fascinating story, and Weinberg (Last of the Pirates: The Search for Bob Denard) tells it well: the "discovery" of the coelacanth by Marjorie Courtney-Latimer, a young South African museum curator, and the identification and naming by J.L.B. Smith, the noted ichthyologist; the territorial fights over who "owned" the fish; and the search for sites other than the Comoros where the fish might live, including the discovery of an Indonesian coelacanth in 1998. Weinberg has used many resources, including Smith's own Old Forelegs (1956), up through Keith Thomson's Living Fossil (LJ 5/15/91) and Peter Forey's History of the Coelacanth Fishes (Chapman & Hall, 1998), none of which capture the spirit of adventure as well as has Weinberg. Her excellent book is recommended for academic and public libraries.
---Jean E. Crampon, Science & Engineering Lib., Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060194952
• ISBN 13: 9780060194956
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240