It is a fish older than dinosaurs, not only can "walk", but also escaped 4 mass extinctions, and there are still traces of it on Earth until now!
Fossils are known to be the remains of paleontology left in rocks. Living fossils are indeed real living life, with a long history, once thought to be extinct or extinct, but have reappeared in people's vision, are some ancient biological species in existence.
Speaking of which, I have to mention a fish called coelacanth. Coelacanth first evolved more than 300 million years ago, and according to research, this creature has long been lost in the Cretaceous mass extinction 65 million years ago. But who would have thought that in the 20th century, this fish would reappear in people's vision.
In 1938, fishermen were fishing in the sea near East London, South Africa, but found a strange fish from the trawl of a fishing boat, about two meters long, still glowing blue, fish scales all over the body, hard as armor, its head is pointed, and even more strange, on the chest and abdomen, there are two thick and strong shark fins, like limbs.
Where did the fishermen know what it was, they pulled it to the dock to sell it. At this time, a woman working at the museum passed by the pier and found this strange fish, so she drew the shape of the fish in a notebook.
But I searched through all the books about fish, but I couldn't find any information. Her curiosity and curiosity were aroused, so she consulted the famous ichthyologist Professor Smith, and in a letter to him she attached a sketch of her coelacanth, hoping to solve the puzzle.
When the professor saw the picture, he exclaimed loudly in shock: "Isn't this a paleontological fish - coelacanth!" "But it's extinct, how can it happen? The excited professor immediately came to London, and the two hurried to the dock where the paleontological fish were found, but they saw a coelacanth with only bones left.
The professor's mood took a sharp turn, both sad and pitying, and the fatigue of the long journey came up for a while, and although the bones were also helpful for research, what was lost was a complete research subject.
After the professor brought the bones back for research, it was verified that this fish was an ancient species of coelacanth. Smith was convinced that this one would not be the only one, and he printed a large number of leaflets with images of coelacanths, saying that those who found the fish could be rewarded heavily.
Soon, World War II broke out, and the search for fish was naturally forgotten, but Professor Smith was always looking for it. It wasn't until 1952 that the fishermen of the Comoros Islands rediscovered the fish, and the professor flew here in a hurry, and finally saw the coelacanth that he was chasing for!
In the years that followed, people successively found traces of this creature fish. In July 1955, 15 such fish were found deep off the Comoros archipelago in the Indian Ocean; In 1998, Indonesian fishermen also caught coelacanth; In 2010, the coelacanth was also found in Sodwana Bay in South Africa.
According to scientists, coelacanths are a 65-million-year-old total fin that not only breathes air, but also walks on fins.
It is speculated that about 400 million years ago, changes in the living environment made the ancestors of coelacanths climb on land with their fins, and some quickly adapted to land and became true quadrupeds, but some could not survive on land and returned to the sea.
In June 2021, some marine evolutionary ecologists said that coelacanths are not only large in size, but also have a long lifespan, likely approaching a century. Although there are still traces of coelacanth, it grows extremely slowly and takes at least five years to gestation, so it is vulnerable to climate and overfishing.
However, authorities have begun to protect coelacanth, which are banned in the International Convention for Trade in Danger (CITES) and have been proposed as a near-threatened species by U.S. marine fisheries.
