Chapter Six 



NO DEEP-SEA REFUGEE 



A FTER the initial shock of the discovery had passed, one of 

 JLiL the first problems to present itself was that of where these 

 Coelacanths lived. They had, of course, been in existence incredibly 

 long before any type of ape or man appeared, and all through the 

 many thousands of years it had taken modern man to evolve and 

 develop they must have been living as well. Yet right up to 1938 

 no scientist had ever seen or even suspected the existence of a 

 living Coelacanth. As has been explained, it had been comfortably 

 settled that all Coelacanths must have died out at least 50 million 

 years ago, and they occupied merely a remote niche in the con- 

 sciousness of most scientists, except for a very few most highly 

 specialised workers. Now, in the shock of the discovery, scientists 

 all over the world were busy considering the problem of how such 

 a large and curious-looking creature had managed to escape notice 

 all this time. 



One obvious way out was the theory advanced by Dr. E. I. 

 White of the British Museum, who not long after the discovery 

 was announced, published an article, mentioned earlier, in an 

 illustrated periodical, in which he stated: 



Our living Coelacanth, although trawled in only 40 fathoms, 

 almost certainly was a wanderer from deeper parts of the sea to 

 which its kind have retreated in the face of fierce competition with 

 the more active modern types of fishes. This opens up the interesting 

 possibility that other remarkable relic-forms may also inhabit the 

 more inaccessible depths of the oceans. 



I could never understand how this view could find acceptance. 

 To me one glance at the Coelacanth disposed of any idea that it 

 lived in the 'inaccessible depths of the ocean' ; yet a number of 

 scientists all over the world apparently accepted this with a sigh 

 of uncritical relief. It explained the whole thing ! It is astonishing 



