Eighty years ago, a museum curator aboard a fishing trawler in the Indian Ocean got a shock felt around the world. In a net full of mundane fish, he found one he'd never expected to see. It was a coelecanth. Why hadn't he expected to see it? Because ichthyologists (fish scientists) believed it had gone extinct 65 million years before. Yet there it was, flopping around, all too alive to have gone extinct 65 million years ago. The discovery shook the world of marine biologists. Fast forward … [Read more...]