352 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 3 



a stuffed skin by the time it came into his hands — for he wanted to be 

 able to preserve the whole fish so that its internal organs should be 

 available for scientific investigation. 



If anything, this event aroused even more interest than the first, 

 although the experts had been waiting for it to happen, for it was 

 considered most unlikely that the first specimen (which Professor 

 Smith called Latimeria chalumnae) was the very last of its kind. 

 Sooner or later another specimen of Latimeria seemed certain to be 

 caught as a result of the intensive search that its appearance had 

 provoked. But what we had not expected was that the next speci- 

 men should belong to an altogether different kind, now named Malania 

 anjouanae, and the existence of a third and smaller species is hinted 

 at. For a single isolated animal to have been overlooked is under- 

 standable enough, but when it comes to two or three, constituting a 

 small fauna, it is quite another matter and suggests further inquiry 

 into the reasons for their separation. 



Figure 1. — The last known fossil coelacanth, Macropoma lezoesiensis, from the Chalk of 

 southeast England. In this restored figure the scales have been omitted to show the bony- 

 air sac lying under the backbone. (After Smith Woodward, "Fossil Fishes of the English 

 Chalk," courtesy of Palaeontographical Society, London.) 



The name Coelacanthus was first given by the great Swiss 

 naturalist, Louis Agassiz, in 1839, to a fossil found during work on 

 one of the early railway cuttings at Ferryhill, about 7 miles south of 

 Durham. It came from the Marl Slate, which is of Permian age 

 and therefore 200 million years old, and the name is derived from 

 the Greek, k.oI\os hollow, and aKavOa a spine, because the fin rays 

 (i. e., the slender bones supporting the fins) were ossified only super- 

 ficially, leaving large internal cavities in the fossils. Since the time 

 of Agassiz many different genera of coelacanths have been described 

 from various formations and areas, starting from the Upper Devon- 

 ian and ending, as we once thought, in the Upper Cretaceous, a span 

 of some 230 million years. 



During this vast period of time the coelacanths changed very little 

 in general appearance (fig. 1 and pi. 1, fig. 1). Many of the fossil 



