Transylvanian Dinosaurs

CHAPTER 6. Living Fossils and Their Ghosts: Being a Short Interlude on Coelacanths and Transylvanian Ornithopods

147 CHAPTER 6 Living Fossils and Their Ghosts Being a Short Interlude on Coelacanths and Transylvanian Ornithopods For evolutionary biologists of all sorts, 23 December 1938 was a very important day. It was then that a trawler called the Nerine put into port at the town of East London, located about 850 km to the east of Cape Town, South Africa. The skipper, Captain Hendrick Goosen, made a living fishing the nearby coastal waters of the Indian Ocean. Having made friends with Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the curator of a small local museum, he would often have the dockman call Courtenay-Latimer to come look over the Nerine’s catch and to take any unusual specimens she wanted for her museum. On this particular day, the Nerine entered port after trawling o√ the mouth of the nearby Chalumna River. When the dockman called Courtenay-Latimer, she took a taxi to the ship, delivered her Christmas greetings to the captain and crew, and went through that day’s catch for anything unusual. There, beneath a pile of rays and sharks on the deck, was, as she put it, ‘‘the most beautiful fish I had ever seen, five feet long, and a pale mauve blue with iridescent silver markings .’’∞ Although she had no idea what the fish was, she did know that it had to go back to the East London Museum at once. After convincing the taxi driver to allow the reeking, 5 ft fish to accompany her, he drove her and the specimen back to the museum. Back in her o≈ce, Courtenay-Latimer tried to identify the bizarre creature (figure 6.1) by combing through the few reference books in her library. A picture of a long-extinct fish bore the greatest resemblance, 148 transylvanian dinosaurs particularly in the structure of the head and the trilobed shape of the tail. She made a crude sketch of her discovery and sent the drawing and a short description to Professor J. L. B. Smith, a chemistry professor at Rhodes University in nearby Grahamstown, who also was locally well known as an amateur ichthyologist. Unfortunately, Smith was away for the Christmas holidays and the consensus back home was going against her increasingly odiferous fish—the director of the East London Museum dismissed it as a common rock cod. In an e√ort to preserve the fish by mounting it, much of the viscera had been discarded and then lost, and, to the great disappointment of all concerned, even the photographs taken of the preparation were spoiled. When Smith finally visited the East London museum on 16 February, he immediately identified the fish as a coelacanth, a group of fish thought to have gone extinct toward the end of the Cretaceous, some 80 million years ago. Called the ‘‘most important zoological find of the century,’’ this discovery made Smith and Courtenay-Latimer overnight celebrities. In 1939, the fish was named Latimeria chalumnae (after CourtenayLatimer and the river near where it had been collected) by Smith. The saga of the coelacanth continues. On 21 December 1952, Captain Eric Hunt, a British sailor operating in the waters o√ the Comorean island of Anjouan, was approached by two islanders carrying a hefty bundle. One of them, Ahamadi Abdallah, had caught a heavy, grouperlike fish by hand line, while the other—a schoolteacher named A√ane Mohamed—thought the fish might be the fabled coelacanth. Hunt had the fish salted on the spot, then had it injected with formalin to preserve its internal organs, and cabled J. L. B. Smith in South Africa. After some delay, which was laced with confusion and frustration, Smith managed to reach the Comoros and, when he saw the dead fish, he is said to have wept. It was indeed a coelacanth, this time with its organs intact and captured most probably near the creature’s actual habitat. Thereafter, quite a number of coelacanths have been caught for study, first by French researchers and, after the Comoros Islands became independent in the 1970s, by various international groups of scientists. In addition, Latimeria has been studied in its natural habitat by direct observations and by videos obtained by submersibles diving in the waters o√ the Comoros Islands.≤ A most remarkable chapter in the history of the study of modern Living Fossils and Their Ghosts 149 Figure 6.1. The icon of living fossils, Latimeria chalumnae coelacanths began on 30 July 1998...