Fish Caught In Time the Search for The

作者:Weinberg, Samantha

页数:256

出版时间:2000-5

价格:108.00元

isbn号码:9781857029079

A gripping story of obsession, adventure and the search for our oldest surviving ancestor -- 400 million years old -- a four-limbed dinofish! In 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young South African museum curator, caught sight of a specimen among a fisherman's trawl that she knew was special. With limb-like protuberances culminating in fins the strange fish was unlike anything she had ever seen. The museum board members dismissed it as a common lungfish, but when Marjorie eventually contacted Professor JLB Smith, he immediately identified her fish as a coelacanth -- a species known to have lived 400 million years ago, and believed by many scientists to be the evolutionary missing link -- the first creature to crawl out of the sea. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had thus made the century's greatest zoological discovery. But Smith needed a live or frozen specimen to verify the discovery, so began his search for another coelacanth, to which he devoted his life.