[CRICKETS CHIRPING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
PER AHLBERG: You have this fish that's--
it's like a sort of living time machine.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: It was like looking
at a dinosaur, this creature that has been around
for 400 million years.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
KEITH THOMSON: It was December the 22nd, 1938.
On this hot December day in East London, South Africa,
a trawler came into town and deposited its load of fish.
And the trawler captain had a habit
of keeping any odd-looking interesting specimens
and giving them to the curator of the local museum, Marjorie
Courtney Latimer.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: She loved nature so much,
and she wanted to make the museum's collections the best
they possibly could be.
And so she went down to the harbor side.
She described picking through this big pile of slimy fish
and eels, and then suddenly, she saw, poking up,
this sort of strange blue fin.
PER AHLBERG: It's a very distinctive kind
of fish with strange, fleshy, limb-like fins.
This thing was like nothing she had ever seen.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: She said to the chairman of the museum,
I think this is something really special.
He went, oh, no, little Latimer, it's just a rock cod.
But she knew in her gut that it was something different.
And she thought, well, I've got to find a way to preserve it.
So she set off on Christmas Eve in East London.
KEITH THOMSON: She tried to get the local cold storage
company to take care of it.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: They said, oh, no way.
Go away.
KEITH THOMSON: She tried to get a local mortuary to embalm it.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: They said, oh, we can't
have any stinking fish here.
She said, why?
All the other people in here are dead anyway.
KEITH THOMSON: So eventually, it was given to a taxidermist.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: And she thought, well,
I've got to find someone to identify this fish.
And she immediately thought of Professor JLB Smith.
KEITH THOMSON: Who was the only ichthyologist in South Africa.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: So she drew a rough little drawing
and sent a letter.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
As soon as he saw the fish, he walked round
and round it slowly.
KEITH THOMSON: He practically fainted.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: He said, "it was like bombs going off
in my head, and I was seeing the shape of a fish known only
from fossils."
PER AHLBERG: It's such a characteristic shape.
It's like the outline of a Viking ship.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: This was the coelacanth,
a fish that was thought to have become extinct
65 million years ago.
It was like a dinosaur had just come into your living room.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
PER AHLBERG: You know, 400 million years ago, these
were just a bunch of fishes, very
much like other kinds of fish that were around at the time.
But now, they are these absolute anomalies.
There's nothing else like it on the planet.
KEITH THOMSON: They had, in fact, made
the discovery of the century.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
PER AHLBERG: It was given the name
Latimeria chalumnae in honor of Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer.
KEITH THOMSON: Without her, the specimen
wouldn't have been preserved.
PER AHLBERG: The key excitement was the fact
that this was such an obvious living fossil.
KEITH THOMSON: Charles Darwin came up
with a term that's sort of dumb in a way, because if it's
alive, it can't be a fossil, but what it means
is there's an early fossil record, then a total gap,
and then there happens to be a living one.
It doesn't mean that hundreds and hundreds of its relatives
haven't become extinct.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: One of the things
I love about the coelacanth is that it's seen history past.
PER AHLBERG: When the coelacanths first
appeared as one lineage of lobe-finned fish,
among other similar looking forms, well,
what can you say about the world?
They shared the waters with strange, armored, jawless fish
with sucker-like mouths.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
One lineage of their close relatives
started nosing around in the shallows,
and then I suppose from the coelacanth's perspective, just
sort of disappeared out of view as they emerged onto the land.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: I like to sort
of think of the coelacanth as saying, bye, and good luck.
PER AHLBERG: We get into the period of the cold swamps
producing so much oxygen that it becomes
possible for dragonflies the size of falcons and millipedes
longer than a man.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The world is suddenly struck by a gigantic mass extinction,
something like 90% of all species disappear.
Coelacanths sort of keep going.
They've perhaps taken a bit of a knock,
but there are quite a lot of them.
They swim around, do their coelacanth thing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Another huge mass extinction.
Then mammals diversify on the land.
Primates emerge, one primate lineage starts standing up
on its hind limbs, starts speaking, and here we are.
And meanwhile, coelacanths, well, they
haven't really changed.
That is a truly astonishing thing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
For me, personally, it is just that the world
should have such things in it that it should
be possible to see this kind of improbable ghostly messenger
from the very deep past.
SAMANTHA WEINBERG: And I just hope
that the coelacanth manages to outlive us all
and keep going and witnessing what is to come.
[MUSIC PLAYING]