The Search for the Coelacanth
Just before Christmas in 1938, the young woman curator of a small South African museum spotted a strange-looking fish in a trawler's catch. It was five feet long, with steel-blue scales, luminescent eyes and remarkable limb-like fins, unlike those of any fish she had ever seen. Determined to preserve her unusual find, she searched for days for a way to save it, but ended up with only the skin and a few bones.
A charismatic amateur ichthyologist, J.L.B. Smith saw a thumbnail sketch of the fish and was thunderstruck. He recognised it as a coelacanth, a creature known from fossils dating back 400 million years and thought to have died out with the dinosaurs. With its extraordinary limbs, the coelacanth was believed to be the first fish to crawl from the sea and evolve into reptiles, mammals and eventually mankind. The discovery was immediately dubbed the "greatest scientific find of the century".
Smith devoted his life to the search for a complete specimen, a fourteen-year odyssey which culminated in a dramatic act of international piracy. As the fame of the coelacanth spread, so did rumours and obsessions. Nations fought over it, multimillion dollar expeditions were launched and submarines hand-built to find it. In 1998 the rumours and the truth came together in a gripping climax which brought the ceolacanth back into the international limelight.
