A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth

di Samantha Weinberg (Autore)

HarperCollins Publishers, 2000

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.

• Autore: Samantha Weinberg
• Editore: HarperCollins Publishers
• Anno: 2000
• Rilegatura: Paperback / softback
• Pagine: 256 p.
• Dimensioni: 198 x 129 mm
• Peso: 207 gr.
• EAN: 9781857029079

Testo in English