ON DECEMBER DAY in 1938 the captain and crew of a fishing trawler were had at work off the southern coast of Africa. Day after day, this business was the same. Set out the nets. Pull in the nets. Sort the fist.Haul them back to town on the mainland, shell them, then get ready to go out again.
During his years of commercial fishing the captain had brought up into the African sunlight every species of fish he could think of. There had been little fish, big fish, dull-colored creatures, and others to rival the rainbow. The captain believed,in fact, that he had seen about everything there was to see from down there in the deepening shadows.
But on this December day there was strange fish, out of the past, crawling, sluggishly on the bottom some 250 feet beneath the surface.It watched the sleek forms of other fish that swam by, and its large muscular too close.
If the antique creature, half crawling and half swimming about on the ocean floor, had been a little faster be might have evaded the net. The net, stretching out through the water, moved closer and closer until there was no longer any way to escape it, and the next thing the creature realized it was being rolled and tumbled along by a force too strong to fight. Smaller fish were now all around him, but he had forgotten his hunger.
When the net full of fish was dumped out, the crew looked over the catch. Hundreds of fish were wiggling and squirming there in one pile. Then a crewman spotted the strange large fish the net had scooped off the ocean floor.
The captain saw it, scratched his grizzled chin, and shook his head in bewilderment. Nobody in the crew could recall seeing anything to match this one. Steel blue in color, the monster fish had large scales, weighed 125 pounds, and was 5 feet long. The crew members soon found that the fish was still alive. If they put a hand too close to its gaping jaws, it grabbed for them with those snapping sharp teeth.It lived four more hours.
By then the captain had decided that the he would take this strange creature to the museum when he reached port. Perhaps the curator,Miss Courtenay-Latimer, could tell him what manner of creature be had dredged from the bounty of the sea.
By the time the trawler docked the fish was three days dead.The smell was something a person simply had to adjust to. The fish was so far gone that the museum curator could save only its skin and skull.
Miss Courtenay-Latimer was puzzled. But one who would surely know was Professor J.L.B. Smith. Professor Smith was located at the Albany Museum twenty-five miles west in Grahamstown. Miss Courtenay-Latimer sent off a wire to Professor Smith.A few days later Miss Courtenay-Latimer led him to the refrigerator in which she had stored the puzzling remains.
The story of fish, a Professor Smith and others of his profession know,goes back through the geologic ages to the very beginning of vertebrate life. Some of the story has been read in the record of the rocks were science has found clues in the fossils. Ancient and extinct creatures, washed into muddy deltas and buried in swamps, have had their forms preserved. By studying the rocks, layer by layer, scientists have unraveled the mysteries. From present back into the past, deeper and deeper, the trails lead. Not long ago there were the mastodons and the saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths, and giant beaver. These were early representatives of the mammals.
Back beyond the mammals there were the ages during which bird evolved, and further still the times when reptiles,including the giant dinosaurs, ruled the earth.
Millions of years before that, however, no vertebrate animals at all yet lived on land. All life was in the sea, and fishes were evolving from lower creatures. One step in this rise of animals has long drawn the attention of scientists. This is the mystery of how creatures of the seas finally came out onto land to live. which of the fish fathered the land dwellers? What manner of creature ventured from those ancient seas millions of years ago to wander among the giant ferns and primitive plants?
One of the scientist who had studied this giant step in the animal kingdom was Professor Smith. He knew what the fossils had told science. Especially he knew about a group of ancient fish that scientists called "Coelacanths".
Hundreds of fossils of Coelacanths had already been dug up, stored in museums, studied, and written about in the annals science. Many scientists were agreed, as they still are, that is was the group that gave rise to the land creatures. From some pioneering branch of the Coelacanth's family had emerged individuals able to adapt to life on land. Maybe in those changing ages, ponds dried and individuals struggling to locate new waters managed short, then longer trips over land. This is speculation.
So complete were fossils of the Coelacanth that scientists in their laboratories managed to unravel much of the story of this fish of long ago. It had, even in those days, scales the overlapped like shingles, a perfectly good design still found on today's fish. It possessed, most interestingly of all perhaps, strange stumps connecting its fin to its body. The short stumps reminded scientists of beginning legs, and it was easy to see that the fins of these primitive fish must have been used for crawling around the floor of the sea.
When scientists discussed Coelacanths they spoke of them in the past tense. All evidence pointed toward a story that ended millions of years ago. Saber-toothed tigers were gone. Mammoths were gone. Dinosaurs were gone. Thousands of species had evolved, flourished, then passed on, extinct and largely forgotten. The Coelacanth, according to the record of the rocks, had lived two hundred million years before the dinosaurs. They had lived in many parts of the world from South America,Africa, Europe, and Greenland. But they had started on their downward trail at least one hundred million years ago. The youngest fossil remains of them were judge to be seventy million years old. No wonder scientists spoke of the Coelacanth as history. Any creature that has been gone for seventy million years is extinct indeed. The marvel of it was that scientists million of years knew almost exactly what the Coelacanth looked like when it was still crawling about the seas.
Meanwhile, back in the lab, Miss Courtenay-Latimer opened the refrigerator, removed the remains, and looked questioningly at the learned Professor Smith. Slowly there spread across his countenance a strange expression. He left as if he had stepped into a time capsule and been whisked back through the history of the earth ten million years, twenty million, seventy million. Before him was the remains of a true Coelacanth. Only days before it had been alive, crawling about on the bottom of the sea.
Understandably, when word of this identification flashed out from South Africa to scientists around the world, many were stunned. Some frankly did not believe it. The Coelacanth was extinct. It had been extinct all those million of the years. And that was that. But the story was soon confirmed.
This set in motion one of the most heartbreaking searches in all the world of natural history. In the following weeks Professor Smith wanted, more than anything else in the world, to have another Coelacanth. He wanted one that was whole so specialists could study its organs and structure part by part. What facts such a specimen might reveal!
First, Professor Smith asked him self where in the world men might stand the best opportunity of finding more of these strange creatures. A scientist experienced in the study of fish can, by looking at the outside of a fish, tell something of the kind of world it inhabits. The Coelacanth was no exception. Those strong scales would be protection against rough rocky ledges. The creature was obviously a slow mover, not a speeding, streamlined fish. Therefore the Coelacanth probably did not capture its prey by out maneuvering the fish it ate. Instead, Professor Smith surmised, it must lurk like a demon in the shadows of rocky crevices, waiting for prey to swim by.
On the other hand there was every reason to believe the Coelacanth would take a fisherman's baited hook. Why then, in a part of the world where fisherman worked the waters every day in their perpetual search for food, had people not caught these creature? The Coelacanth must live in deep waters. Deep waters, rough rocky ledges, places where the trawler had taken the strange fish.
This set Professor Smith to thinking abouyt the whole east coast of Africa. Where, along that stretch of land, were the reefs and deep waters that might harbor more Coelacanths? He had the advantage of knowing this section of the world thoroughly from his own studies. Northward toward the Equator, along the shore of Madagaskar, around such island groups as the Comores, those were the places to concentrate in the search.
Next the professor wrote a circular showing a drawing of the Coelacanth and offering a reward of one hundred pounds (about eight hundred dollars) to anyone whocould bring him one. "Look carefully at this fish," the circular told thousands of fisherman along the coast and through the islands,"it may bring you good fortune. If you have the good fortune to catch or find one, do not cut or clean it any way but get it whole at once to a cold storage."
Hopefully, thousands of these circulars were distributed along the coast. The months dragged into years. Professor Smith never gave up. Somewhere there had to be more Coelacanths.His search continued.
Fourteen years passed. Ahmed Hussein had been fishing, as he often did,with hook and line about two hundred yards of the shore. He struggled to bring a tremendous fish into his boat. Next day he took it to town to the market place and offered it for sale,hoping someone wanted a fish so large and fat.
But one of his friends in the market showed him a wrinkled scrap of paper, a copy of Professor Smith's circular. Together they studied the picture. Hussein became more and more excited.
Some days later, in a special airplane supplied by the government, Professor Smith arrived. There on the deck of a friend's ship was a box with the contents packed in soft materials.
The professor was too nervous to unwrap the fish, and the crew laid back the covering.By then the professor was on his knees beside the box. He took one quick look at the magnificent antique fish. The long search was ended. "I'm not ashamed," the professor later wrote, "to say that I wept. It was a Coelacanth."
During the next few years others were found, and scientists in their laboratories studied these links with lost age.
What they learned only strengthened their earlier conclusions. This was not, as some said, the exact creature that had adapted to walk on land and led to reptiles, birds, and all other land vertebrates, including man, but it was of the same family.
There had been many kinds of Coelacanths. They had been much alike wherever they lived throughout the world. Even these that had changed from those ancient fossil forms. A member of this family had bridged the gap between the animals of land and sea.
In the world of science, the Coelacanths has been hailed as the greatest biological discovery of of the century.
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