The coelacanth: A living fossil of a fish - Erin Eastwood
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-coelacanth-a-living-fossil-of-a-fish-erin-eastwood The coelacanth, a prehistoric fish that was mistakenly thought to have gone extinct at the...
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The dead coming back to life sounds scary. But for scientists, it can be a wonderful opportunity. Of course, we're not talking about zombies. Rather, this particular opportunity came in the unlikely form of large, slow-moving fish called the coelacanth. This oddity dates back 360 million years, and was believed to have died out during the same mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. To biologists and paleontologists, this creature was a very old and fascinating but entirely extinct fish, forever fossilized. That is, until 1938 when Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a curator at a South African museum, came across a prehistoric looking, gleaming blue fish hauled up at the nearby docks. She had a hunch that this strange, 1.5 m...
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The dead coming back to life sounds scary. But for scientists, it can be a wonderful opportunity. Of course, we're not talking about zombies. Rather, this particular opportunity came in the unlikely form of large, slow-moving fish called the coelacanth. This oddity dates back 360 million years, and was believed to have died out during the same mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. To biologists and paleontologists, this creature was a very old and fascinating but entirely extinct fish, forever fossilized. That is, until 1938 when Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a curator at a South African museum, came across a prehistoric looking, gleaming blue fish hauled up at the nearby docks. She had a hunch that this strange, 1.5 m...
