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The first fossil of a coelacanth was a jaw discovered in 1836 that originated in Australia. It was discovered and identified by a naturalist named Louis Agassiz and is believed to be over 360 million years old. Since then, coelacanth fossils have been discovered on each continent, with the exception of Antarctica. The first living specimen of coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae, was found in December of 1938 in South Africa by a fishing trawler. The captain of this trawler often contacted a South African museum curator, named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, to examine the coelacanth, which he had set aside because it seemed unusual. The fish was later named after this curator and eventually had a taxidermy done on it. It is still on display in the East London museum in South Africa today.
The first live specimen of Latimeria menadoensis was discovered in 1997 by a marine biologist. This discovery was made in a fish market in Indonesia. Numerous living specimens have been both caught and viewed in the ocean since this time, but sightings are rare due to the endangered status of this fish.
A unique fact about the coelacanth’s fossil record is that the first live specimen was found 100 years after the first fossil was identified. The opposite of this is the usual case with most species.
Coelacanths originally were thought to have lived from the Middle Devonian to the Upper Cretaceous period. Research has led to the conclusion that around 250 million in the past there were up to 30 species of coelacanth alive and about ten of these species were most common in fresh water habitats. These were different from modern coelacanth in that they were on average around half a meter long, while today they are normally several meters long. It was believed that they had been extinct for over 66 million years as a result of the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction, but this was obviously not the case.
An international team of scientists had recently set out to research and sequence the genome of Latimeria chalumnae in order to determine its place in the evolution of tetrapods and vertebrates on land. This research led to the conclusion that another fish, lungfish, are more closely related to tetrapods and therefore more likely to have contributed to the evolution of vertebrate life on land, but the coelacanth is a close relative to lungfish. This study also revealed that the divergence of coelacanths, lungfish and tetrapods most likely happened around 390 million years ago.