Coelacanth, the discovery of a "living fossil"

In the "Greatest Fish Story Ever Told", the first coelacanth known to modern science was discovered in 1938 when a young museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was invited down to the docks to examine a sstrange fish brought in on the trawler, Nerine . She sent a sketch to fish expert JLB Smith, who soon identified the fish as a living coelacanth- a word meaning hollow spine in Greek. The coelacanth fishes were known only from fossils, the most recent of which dated from the late Cretaceous 65 million years ago, so the discovery created a world wide sensation and was called the "biological find of the century"- the same as finding a living dinosaur. The discovery was given the scientific name Latimeria

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