Fishy yarn

SOME years ago, after an especially bibulous evening, a friend claimed he had seen a cheetah in an arid, remote scrub jungle. My friend is a good wildlifer and not especially fanciful or inventive, so this was electrifying news, given that the cheetah has been extinct in India for several decades. I have heard nothing more about the momentous discovery, so the rum must have been especially potent that evening.

J.L.B. Smith, South Africa's top scientist did not think his informant Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was drunk when she sent him a crude drawing of a fish in 1938. He merely suspected his own sanity for thinking it to be what every shred of common sense told him was impossible. For the likeness he was looking at resembled a creature that had been extinct more than 300 million years. There were few telephones at the time, so Courtenay- Latimer had to wait a fortnight for Smith to visit the small town of East London to investigate her fish. When he did, this was his impression of what he beheld. "Although I had come prepared, that first sight hit me like a white-hot blast and made me feel shaky and queer, my body tingled. I stood as if stricken to stone. Yes, there was not a shadow of doubt, scale by scale, bone by bone, fin by fin, it was a Coelacanth".

A Fish Caught In Time: The Search For the Coelacanth, by Samantha Weinberg (Fourth Estate), is the story of the rediscovery of the fish from a time before time, and the developments that followed the appearance of the first fish in the museum Courtenay-Latimer ran in her little South African coastal town.

The Coelacanth first appeared in the Devonian age, 410 million years ago. Ms Weinberg writes, "It was during this period, often called the Age of Fishes, that the first boney fishes, the vertebrates, appeared on the scene. Even these would look unfamiliar today, with their encasements of heavy armour, protection from the omnipresent predators. The vertebrates were divided into two groups: the ray-finned fishes ... and the lobe- finned fishes ... whose fins appeared to sprout from the end of fishy, limb like lobes, almost like twelve legs ... sometime towards the end of the Devonian period, a single species of freshwater lobe finned fish evolved legs. In its new guise ... it crawled out of the water to conquer the land - this much scientists agreed upon. What was not so certain was which of the group evolved into Ichthyostega (literally, walking fish): the lung fish, rhipidistian, or coelacanth?

This far, scientists had only a few species of lung fish to investigate and had necessarily to work with fossil records where the other two groups were concerned. The appearance of a living coelacanth set off shock waves of excitement around the world. Could this weird looking fish be the ancestor of man, the missing link between the fishes and the amphibians who, through million of years, evolved into man?

A Fish Caught In Time ranges far and wide in its investigation. It details the scientific excitement over the coelacanth and it also goes into the human saga that eventually tracked the fish to its lair deep in the ocean beneath the Comoro islands.

It is an exciting story, and its author proves to be adept at telling it. It should appeal to you if you have a yen for natural history, evolution, ichthyology or a rattling good yarn.

DAVID DAVIDAR

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