A 66-Million-Years Extinct Fish was Found on a South African Fishing Boat

Have you ever heard a tale of a person who vanished and then shown up years later? Although it's uncommon, it does occasionally happen. Sometimes a person runs away and disappears, while other times they stage their own demise. Amnesia may even play a role occasionally. Whatever the cause, it always makes a dramatic return. Imagine it multiplied by 66 million. That is the tale of the coelacanth, a fish thought to have perished 66 million years ago but recently found alive and well on a fishing boat.

Fossils of coelacanths go back more than 410 million years. They appeared to have reached their natural end 66 million years ago, because, let's be honest, 344 million years is a tremendous amount of time. In 1938, the curator of a South African natural history museum received a call informing her that a fishing trawler had arrived with a cargo of fish that she might be interested in sorting through for unique specimens. She looked, and there, five feet long and unlike anything she or the fishermen had ever seen, was an odd blue-finned creature.

The curator attempted to contact a fish expert to examine the specimen, but communication was delayed, and it took him almost two weeks to hear from her. When he did, he was so thrilled that he offered to search the dump for the fish's guts, which had already been thrown away by that point.

Of course, the coelacanth ended up being the fish. More specimens have been found since the first finding, but not in significant numbers. Only 84 had been caught by 1975. However, that's still a significant amount for a fish that was predicted to have disappeared before the T. Rex.