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,...
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