The Coelacanth Fishes 



By Errol White, D. Sc, F. G. S. 



Department of Geology 

 British Museum (Natural History) 



[With 1 plate] 



Now 'i^AT most of the excitement over the discoveiy of a second 

 specimen of a living coelacanth fish has died down for the time 

 being and Prof. J. L. B. Smith's preliminary account of the creature 

 has been published in Nature (January 17, 1953, pp. 99-101), wo 

 may make an assessment of its importance. 



The landing of the first coelacanth late in 1938, it will be recalled, 

 created one of the biggest sensations for many years among zoologists, 

 and rightly so, for it showed the continued existence of an archaic 

 type of animal that scientists thought had disappeared some 70 mil- 

 lion years ago, at the end of the age of the great reptiles : the dino- 

 saurs, the marine ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, and the flying 

 pterodactyls. So far as we then knew, the last coelacanths swam in 

 the shallow seas which at that remote period covered what is now the 

 south of England, when the white chalk, the characteristic feature of 

 the cliffs of our southeast coastline, was being formed as ooze on the 

 sea floor. 



The impact of this discovery on the mind of the general public was 

 extraordinary, for fishes do not often make news items in daily 

 papers, and probably it can be justifiably claimed that no fish was 

 ever considered more newsworthy. 



The circumstances of the discovery of the second coelacanth just 

 before Christmas of 1952 were equally dramatic, but in a different 

 way and one more likely to appeal to popular imagination — it will 

 be remembered how Professor Smith, who had for 14 years sought for 

 it up and down the coast of East Africa, flew some 2,000 miles to the 

 remote Comoro Islands in a successful attempt to beat the weather 

 and the forces of decomposition. His haste to reach the second coela- 

 canth was dictated by the need to ensure that this specimen should 

 not suffer the fate of the first — that specimen was little more than 



* Reprinted by permission from Discovery, April 1953, Norwich, England. 



351 



