I See A Coelacanth

More than one, in fact. And, it turned out, in more than one place. Not quite as rare as "I see dead people," in The Sixth Sense, but it probably would have felt that way on Christmas Eve in Port Elizabeth, South Africa seventy-two years ago when a fisherman showed a drawing of a fish his ship had netted earlier that day to the curator of a small natural history museum. She knew it was something special because she had never seen such a fish before, so she did a free-hand drawing of it and sent the drawing to a fellow curator of a larger museum. He confirmed that what she had drawn and the ship had caught was a fish that until that moment scientists had believed had gone extinct around 75 million years ago, or about the time of the fifth great extinction on the planet which also killed -- among many other species -- all the non-avian dinosaurs.

And then after that narration, the curator at the American Museum of Natural History who was conducting this "Behind the Scenes" tour unfastened a couple latches on what looked to be the sort of container that a hunter would use to deep-freeze his moose meat and opened it to show us two coelacanths preserved in alcohol that the museum had obtained some years before. Their color had gone and they were a darkish gray rather than blue, but there they were, with four lobed fins that made them, as ancestors to tetrapods, more closely related to us than to all other fish alive today. Every once in a while the word "awestruck" really does apply.

Not even three weeks later, we stopped for a couple of very rainy days in San Francisco on our way back from Hawaii and went on a Sunday afternoon -- one day after the Giants won the NL pennant from the Phillies -- to the aquarium of the California Academy of Sciences. They have a Staff Favorites section in the aquarium and there I found yet another preserved coelacanth.

Populations have now been found off the Comoros, Mozambique, Madagascar, Indonesia and, most recently, in relatively shallow water off South Africa. How they managed to elude extinction remains unknown.