"Living Fossil"

In the cinema version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World, a remote wilderness is peopled with fantastic dinosaurs, purported survivors of the Age of Reptiles (200 million to 60 million years ago). No one believes that such creatures actually live anywhere in the modern world, for one reason because its land areas have been too well explored. But the bottom of the sea has not been explored. Last week ichthyologists scratched their heads in wonder over completely authenticated reports of a fish, caught alive in December 1938, whose kind should have perished 50 million years ago.

A few days before Christmas a trawler, fishing in 40 fathoms of water off the South African coast, brought up in its net two tons of redfish, kobs and sharks. Among them was a five-foot, 127-lb. fish which had handsome steel-blue scales, dark blue eyes and fins that were trying to be legs. It lived for three hours on deck, taking a bite at the captain's hand. The captain was no scientist but he knew fish, and he had never seen anything like this.

The captain got in touch with a woman naturalist attached to a Cape Province museum, and she in turn summoned Dr. J. L. B. Smith from Rhodes University College in Grahamstown. By the time he arrived, a taxidermist had skinned and mounted the creature, throwing away the carcass (which was rotting) but keeping the skull. Dr. Smith pronounced it "sensational." Photographs were sent to London, where Geologist Errol Ivor White of the British Museum called the find "one of the most amazing events in the realm of Natural History in the 20th Century."

The fish has very archaic gill flaps and lower jaw, big bony scales covered with enamel, lobed and limb-like fins, a curious double tail divided by a spinal projection. It is a typical member of the Coelacanths, a primitive fish family which first appeared 300,000,000 years ago when the only land animals were amphibians, and which was widespread and flourishing when the Age of Reptiles was just getting under way. The family has been considered extinct for 50,000,000 years because that is the most recent date assigned to any Coelacanth fossil found in the rocks. Thus the discovery of a live Coelacanth in the world of airplanes and television is as surprising, from an anatomical and evolutionary point of view, as would be that of a pterodactyl or diplodocus.

The coming to light of this "living fossil" creates an evolutionary mystery. In logic its kind should have disappeared when the seas began to be thronged with more modern, more efficient rivals. A plausible theory is that the Coelacanths retreated to the deeps where competition was not severe, and persisted there as the archaic okapi survived in the dense Congo forests, as the primitive duck-billed platypus in benign Australia. If so, some whim or freak of circumstance brought this particular Coelacanth up from the deeps to the coastal water of South Africa. And the possibility remains that other "living fossils" may lurk in the ocean depths, awaiting the scrutiny of science if science is ingenious enough to retrieve them.

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