Skip to content
Home/ Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth (Revised)
Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth (Revised)
Save Ask us
Publisher
Fourth Estate
Published
May 4, 2000
ISBN-13
9781857029079

Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth (Revised)

by Weinberg, Samantha
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9781857029079 Fourth Estate

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.

Product details

BrandFourth Estate
Pub dateMay 4, 2000
ISBN-101857029070
ISBN-139781857029079
Paperback256.0 pages
LanguageEnglish
Dimensions7.8 × 0.59 × 5.06 in
Weight0 lb
Last updated 2026-09-28 01:25
$7.69 $9.99 23% off
You save $2.30 · list price $9.99
In stock — ships in 24 hours with free tracking
Delivery by Monday, October 26, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Animals - Fish
See all
Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Mysterious Fish
Prosek, James
$15.82
Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth
Weinberg, Samantha
$15.08
Interrelationships of Fishes
<p>Comprising by far the largest and most diverse group of vertebrates, fishes occupy a broad swathe of habitats ranging from the deepest ocean abyss to the highest mountain lakes. Such incredible ecological diversity and the resultant variety in lifestyle, anatomy, physiology and behavior, make unraveling the evolutionary history of fishes a daunting task.</p> <p>The successor of a classic volume by the same title, <i>Interrelationships of Fishes</i>, provides the latest in the "state of the art" of systematics and classification for many of the major groups of fishes. In providing a sound phylogenetic framework from leading authorities in the field, this book is an indispensable reference for a broad range of biologists, especially students of fish behavior, anatomy, physiology, molecular biology, genetics and ecology--in fact, anyone who wishes to interpret their work on fishes in an evolutionary context.</p>
$191.75
Fishes: An Introduction to Ichthyology
Moyle, Peter
$308.29
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
Kurlansky, Mark
$12.78
Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food
Greenberg, Paul
$13.47