Older than dinosaurs: last South African coelacanths threatened by oil exploration
Just 30 of the prehistoric fish known to exist, raising fears oil wells will push it to extinction
Tony Carnie in Durban
Fri 17 Aug 2018 06.29 EDT
Bright blue, older than dinosaurs and weighing as much as an average-sized man, coelacanths are the most endangered fish in South Africa and among the rarest in the world.
Barely 30 of these critically-endangered fish are known to exist off the east coast of South Africa, raising concern that a new oil exploration venture in the area could jeopardise their future.
Coelacanths, whose shape has remained almost unchanged for 420m years, captured world attention when the first living specimen was caught off the port city of East London in 1938. This discovery was followed by the subsequent capture of several more off the Comoros islands in the early 1950s, confirming that coelacanths were definitely not extinct.
December 2000 brought further excitement when divers found a small coelacanth colony in underwater canyons near South Africa’s Sodwana Bay, adjacent to the iSimangaliso wetland park and world heritage site.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/17/older-than-dinosaurs-last-south-african-coelacanths-threatened-by-oil-exploration
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The Lost Coelacanth
No one on board expected that day, December 22, 1938, that a creature believed extinct would be taking up the ship deck. A coelacanth, a fish extinct 65 million of years ago, was captured in South African waters. The specimen was 1.5 meters long and had a weight of 50 kg. It was the only specimen known of the coelacanths' group alive.
Photography of the first coelacanth
This was striking news for the scientific community, because a species believed to be extinct lived in the South African seas. The surprises continued though. In 1998, a new species was discovered alive in the Celebes islands, almost 10,000 km away from the previously known.
This way, it wasn't one, but two the coelacanth species in our seas: Latimeria chalumnae (African species) y Latimeria menadoensis (Indonesian species).
The coelacanths are very peculiar animals nowadays, not only because they are "living fossils", but also because they represent a transition mode from the aquatic to terrestrial environment. Their limbs have some evolutionary characteristics indicating a future movement onto land. This is something we can only see in the coelacanths and the lungfishes.
More:
https://www.jurassic-dreams.com/blogs/jurassic-dreams-the-fossils-blog/the-lost-coelacanth
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