Coelacanth A beautiful fish Living fossil Commentary

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, J. L. B. Smith ichthyology

Coelacanth

• Louis Agassiz described the coelacanth in 1839,
• thought to have died out in the Upper Cretaceous
• sixty-five million years ago, but Hendrik Goosen dredged one up
• from the bottom of the ocean near the Chalumna River, and showed it
• to Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the curator of the local museum,
• who was forced to have it preserved by a taxidermist.
• Fish expert J. L. B. Smith was later able to identify it,
• but Smith hoped, based on its lobbed fins, that the fish
• was a ancestor of the first land-going four-legged vertebrates,
• and he could not tell because all the soft parts
• had been removed by the taxidermist.

A beautiful fish

• Large cosmoid scaled,
• three-lobe tailed,
• vestigial lunged,
• the coelacanth,
• Courtenay-Latimer wrote,
• “was five foot long,
• a pale mauvy blue
• with faint flecks of whitish spots . . .
• an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over. . . .
• covered in hard scales,
• and it had four limb-like fins
• and a strange puppy dog tail.”

Living fossil

• O Latimeria chalumnae,
• you of ancient lineage,
• you “hollow spine” of Cretaceous fossils
• O you pale blue fish,
• you whose scales are armor plates,
• you whose fins grow from stubby limbs,
• you whose tail has a tail
• (your three-lobed diphycercal tail-fin)
• O you whose brain is mostly filled with fat,
• whose single-lobed vestigial lung is useless,
• whose notochord never evolved into a vertebral column,
• whose heart’s chambers are arranged in a straight tube,
• whose eyes are big for seeing deep under dark oceans,
• and whose head is hinged to let you open wide your small mouth
• Could you tell us all, O fish,
• How to be both big and maneuverable?
• How to be lucky in old age?
• How to survive all the millenniums?
• Or are you only the silly one, the one we caught?
• O you exceeding rarity,
• you scrutiny escaper,
• you keeper-to-yourself,
• O great See-lə-kanth.