In 1938, a young female museum curator from South Africa made a
startling discovery in a fisherman's catch: a primitive, ancient
five-foot-long, steely-blue fish of the deep that became the
'scientific find of the century'. She managed to save only skin and
a few bones but from these tantalizing clues and a sketch, the fish
was correctly identified as a coelacanth and so began a 14-year
search for a fresh, complete specimen. This true tale of the sea
carries into the present day with the recent discovery of
coelacanths in Indonesian waters. Destined to become a classic,
this is a beautifully written, designed and produced book - a
wonderful gift. (Kirkus UK)
The dramatic story of the discovery of a 400 million-year-old living fossil. Just before Christmas in 1938, the young woman curator of a small South African museum spotted a strange-looking fish in a trawler's catch. It was five feet long, with steel-blue scales, luminescent eyes and remarkable limb-like fins, unlike those of any other fish she had ever seen. Determined to preserve her unusual find, she searched for days for a way to save it, but ended up with only the skin and a few bones.
A charismatic amateur ichthyologist, J. L. B. Smith saw a thumbnail of the fish and was thunderstruck. He recognised it as a coelacanth (pronounce, 'see-la-kanth'), a creature known from fossils dating back 400 million years and thought to have died out with the dinosaurs. With its extraordinary limbs, the coelacanth was believed to be the first fish to crawl from the sea and evolve into reptiles, mammals and eventually humankind. The discovery was immediately dubbed the 'greatest scientific find of the century'.
Smith devoted his life to the search for a complete specimen, a fourteen-year odyssey which culminated in a dramatic act of international piracy. As the fame of the coelacanth spread, so did rumours and obsessions. Nations fought over it, multimillion-dollar expeditions were launched and submarines hand-built to find it. In 1998 the rumours and the truth came together in a gripping climax, which brought the coelacanth back into the international limelight.
A Fish Caught in Time is the entrancing story of the most rare and precious fish in the world – our own great-uncle forty million times removed.
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