A species
Coelacanth
Latimeria chalumnae
Thought gone for about 66 million years, then found in a fishing net.
You and the coelacanth last shared an ancestor about 420 million years ago (on 25 November, if life's history were one year).
People thought fish like this had died out about 66 million years ago. Then, a few days before Christmas in 1938, a shark net off South Africa pulled up a living one. A museum worker, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, saw how strange it was, and a fish scientist named its group after her. Surprisingly for a fish, it is a distant cousin of four-limbed animals.
It grows to about 2 metres long, as long as a tall adult. Its stocky body is covered in big, thick scales and is dark blue with white speckles in a pattern that is different on each fish. Its four paired fins sit on short, fleshy stalks like stubby limbs, and its large tail has three lobes.
By day it rests in deep underwater caves in dim tropical waters. At night it drifts out to hunt fish, squid and cuttlefish. It has been found as deep as about 700 metres.
A second kind
There are two living kinds. One lives off eastern Africa, mostly near the Comoros Islands, and the second was found near Sulawesi in Indonesia in the late 1990s.
A hinge in its head
Coelacanths are the only living animals with a working joint across the skull. The joint lets the front of the head lift when it feeds.
Too oily to eat
Its oily flesh tastes bad and can make people ill. So no one hunts it for food, though it can be caught by accident in nets.