In 1938, an anonymous South African fisherman pulled something out of his net that looked like a monster. Weighing 100 pounds and 1.5 meters, it is considered one of the most important zoological discoveries of all time — it was identified as the coelacanth, a known species. It is known to have been extinct since the Cretaceous Period, about 65 million years ago.
Of course, they are very rare and difficult to spot – mainly because they are sensitive to light and prefer to hang out at depths of 90 to 180 meters. Incredibly, coelacanth is a "leaf-finned" fish that evolved into amphibians and then mammals.
Like lungfish, they are more closely related to humans and mammals than to "finned" fish such as trout, and their genomes are expected to produce important information about the development of tetrapods — the evolutionary lines of tetrapods produced almost all land animals.
