A Fish Caught in Time: the Search for the Coelacanth

Weinberg, Samantha

ISBN 10: 1857029062 / ISBN 13: 9781857029062

Published by Fourth Estate,, 1999

About this Item

Paperback. Fine. xiii + 239pp.

Seller Inventory # A5560

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Fish Caught in Time: the Search for the Coelacanth
• Publisher: Fourth Estate,
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857029062
• ISBN 13: 9781857029062
• Binding: Soft cover
• Seller catalogs:
  • Twentieth Century

About this title

Synopsis

A unique history of our oldest living ancestor, thought to have been extinct for 70 million years. A gripping story of obsession and adventure set in the exotic islands of the Indian Ocean.

In 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young South African museum curator, caught sight of a specimen among a fisherman’s trawl that she knew was special. With limb-like protuberances culminating in fins the strange fish was unlike anything she had ever seen. The museum board members dismissed it as a common lungfish, but when Marjorie eventually contacted Professor JLB Smith, he immediately identified her fish as a coelacanth – a species known to have lived 400 million years ago, and believed by many scientists to be the evolutionary missing link – the first creature to crawl out of the sea. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had thus made the century’s greatest zoological discovery. But Smith needed a live or frozen specimen to verify the discovery, so began his search for another coelacanth, to which he devoted his life.

About the Author

Samantha Weinberg, 31, is a writer and journalist who was born and brought up in London, educated at Cambridge – but of South African extraction. She has written for most daily broadsheets and magazines. She was until recently features editor of Harpers and Queen. She is author of Last of The Pirates (Cape 1994).