Which fish is known as the living fossil?
the coelacanth “On December 23, 1938, Hendrik Goosen, the captain of the trawler Nerine, returned to the harbour at East London, South Africa, after a trawl around the mouth of the Chalumna River. As he frequently did, he telephoned his friend, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator at East London’s small museum, to see if she wanted to look over the contents of the catch for anything interesting. At the harbour, Latimer noticed a blue fin and took a closer look. There she found what she later described as “the most beautiful fish I had ever seen, five feet long, and a pale mauve blue with iridescent silver markings.” Failing to find a description of the creature in any of her books, she attempted to contact her friend, Professor James Leonard Brierley Smith, but he was away for Christmas. Unable to preserve the fish, she reluctantly sent it to a taxidermist. When Smith returned, he immediately recognized it as a coelacanth, known only from fossils. Smith named the fish Latimeria chalumna
