from the depths had a flexible shell and very much resembled sea 

 urchins found in chalk deposits laid down loo million years ago, 

 but it soon became clear that such rare "living fossils" are also 

 distributed more or less evenly on land, in shallow seas, as well as 

 in the ocean depths. There is no great concentration of them at 

 any one point on land or sea. 



What is probably the most spectacular discovery of a living 

 fossil is that of a group of fishes thought to have died out seventy 

 million years ago. In 1938 a trawler fishing off the Chalumna River, 

 near East London, South Africa, took a five-foot-long fish in its 

 nets. Its paired fins did not spring directly from the body, as is 

 usual, but were on fleshy limbUke lobes, and it had a supplementary 

 tail. Professor J. L. B. Smith, who examined it, noticed its likeness 

 to the fossils of "extinct" coelacanths. Further investigation, and 

 the discovery of more of these fishes suggests that they live in the 

 mid-waters off Madagascar, where the local fishermen have pro- 

 bably been catching and eating them for years. 



Every now and then an ocean-going expedition brings back one 

 or more spectacular finds. While whale fishing around the Azores, 

 Prince Albert of Monaco took an interest in the contents of the 

 sperm whales' stomachs. He was later able to report that they 

 contained the more or less perfect remains of giant squids with 

 ". . . muscular arms, though much shrunken and contracted, as 

 thick as those of a man and covered with more than a hundred 

 great suckers, each armed with a short claw as powerful as those 

 of a Hon or tiger." It is hard to single out any one outstanding 

 specimen discovered by the Challenger because almost everything 

 brought back was novel. The Valdivia is remembered for its deep- 

 sea squids — small squids with beautiful luminescent organs; and 

 also for the single-rod sponge from the Indian Ocean. The German 

 ship Meteor, which went into the South Atlantic during 1925-29, 

 sailed with the intention of trying to extract gold from sea water, 

 but came back instead with valuable information on phytoplankton. 



Whatever else any such expedition may accomplish, each comes 

 back with general collections and systematic data about physical 

 conditions of the sea. From the steady accumulation of all these 

 bits of knowledge a good picture of life in the sea is being labo- 

 riously built up. However, the picture cannot be entirely satis- 

 factory so long as it must be seen from a shore-based biological 

 laboratory or from the deck of a ship. Inevitably the student of 

 marine life longs to go down and see things at firsthand. 



Today the bathyscaphe is our only direct Unk with the deep 

 bottom of the oceans. Developed over the last fifteen years or so, 

 there have been several models, each succeeding one showing im- 

 provements on the last. In 195 3 two French naval officers descended 

 in one to more than 2000 fathoms off Dakar, West Africa; and in 

 i960 came the news that, in an improved model, Jacques Piccard 

 and Lieutenant Donald Walsh of the United States Navy had gone 

 down to more than 6000 fathoms (nearly seven miles) in the 

 Marianas Trench, southwest of Guam in the Pacific. One of the 

 marine biologist's dreams is a bathyscaphe-type vehicle capable of 

 roaming over the sea bottom at any depth, making photographs, 

 sound recordings, and collecting samples at will. Such a device 

 would be an enormous aid to our present techniques of studying 

 life in the sea. 



On the opposite page, a sixteenth-century 

 Indian painting shows Alexander being 

 lowered to the sea bed in his glass diving 

 bell. Since his time oceanographers have 

 devised many ways of exploring the sea 

 bottom by direct means. Cousteau's plunging 

 saucer, shown on this page, is a free- 

 swimming device capable of carrying two 

 people to a depth of about a thousand feet. 

 Future and improved versions of this craft 

 should enable oceanographers to carry out 

 many research activities that today 

 must be controlled from the surface. 



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