Overview

A gripping story of obsession, adventure and the search for our oldest surviving ancestor – 400 million years old – a four-limbed dinofish! 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.

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9781857029079

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Reviews

In 1938, a young female museum curator from South Africa made a startling discovery in a fisherman's catch: a primitive, ancient five-foot-long, steely-blue fish of the deep that became the 'scientific find of the century'. She managed to save only skin and a few bones but from these tantalizing clues and a sketch, the fish was correctly identified as a coelacanth and so began a 14-year search for a fresh, complete specimen. This true tale of the sea carries into the present day with the recent discovery of coelacanths in Indonesian waters. Destined to become a classic, this is a beautifully written, designed and produced book - a wonderful gift. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Samantha Weinberg, 31, is a writer and journalist who was born and brought up in London – 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).

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