After five years of traveling around the world, Charles Robert Darwin came up with an important theory that shook the nineteenth century: he believed that all species evolved from a few common ancestors. Darwin's theory became the main interpretation of the mechanism of evolution and became the basis of modern evolutionary thought. And all higher animals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and even us humans, first evolved from fish.
However, not all fish can evolve into us humans. Paleontologists have found from fossils that between the Devonian and 65 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, about 350-400 million years ago, there was a speartail fish (also called the Ratimai fish, which belongs to the order Offinch, a suborder of the general fin suborder of the order Offinches, and is the only living species of the total fin suborder. It is believed to be the ancestor of terrestrial vertebrates, and for a long time, it was thought that this fish was extinct 60 million years ago. Until December 22, 1938, the discovery of this fossil-only fish in South Africa was a major scientific event of the twentieth century, and its shock was no less powerful than the discovery of a living dinosaur. And the process of discovering it has a twist and turning story.
Speartail specimen
<h1>Professor Smith, I found a strange fish</h1>
On 22 December 1938, a South African trawler named Aristi caught a strange fish about 1.5 meters long and weighing 57.6 kilograms in the deep sea about 73 meters off the west coast of East London Island on the east coast of Africa. The fishermen on board did not know what kind of fish it was, so they called Miss Latimai, who was working at the Museum in East London.
It was Christmas, Miss Latimei was in the museum and a few colleagues to set up a dinosaur skeleton, when she received the call, she felt that she still had to go to see, so Miss Latimai immediately took a taxi to see. Ladimai, who came to the dock, saw this strange fish, its whole body scales like iron armor, tail fin like a short spear, like a hard scaled fish that had been learned in biology class, but didn't this fish only exist in fossils? But what is this living fish in front of you? Miss Latimer didn't know much either, so she had to take the fish to the museum.
In December, south Africa was in the middle of the hot summer, when the temperature was very hot, but there was no freezer in the museum to fit the fish, so Miss Latimei contacted the local freezer to borrow their freezer to freeze the fish, but was refused, and Miss Latimei had no choice but to contact the local master who made the specimen, Mr. S. R· Centre), which preserved the fish and immediately sketched the fish with a precise description, sent by telegram to the museum's visiting professor in another city, Dr. J. Thompson, a renowned ichthyologist who was working at Rhodes University in Grahamstow n. L·B· Smith )。
Unfortunately, it was Christmas, and Professor Smith and his wife were on a trip and did not see the telegram. A few days passed, and because the master who made the specimen was not very skilled, he simply soaked the fish with a cloth and then soaked it in formalin, without doing anything else. As a result, the fish had begun to decay, and Miss Latimer had no choice but to ask Mr. Schetter to peel off the skin of the fish, and the rest of the parts were thrown into the trash.
It was not until January 3, 1939, that Professor Smith returned from vacation, and when he saw the telegram, he was immediately stunned, so he immediately replied to the telegram and said: "The most important thing is to preserve the skull and gills of the fish for identification." "And immediately booked the earliest flight the next day to East London." After receiving the telegram, Mr. Schetter and the museum staff rushed to the garbage dump to search for discarded skulls and gills, but unfortunately they had long gone, and unfortunately, even the photographs taken for the fish were damaged.
Until Professor Smith came to the museum, he only saw a fish skin, very regretful, Smith found that this fish belongs to the long-extinct general fin subclass empty spiny fish, and the morphology has not changed much from the same fossil, and in recognition of Miss Latimer's major discovery, Professor Smith named the fish "Latimeria chalumnae" in a subsequent paper, Latimer as the genus name of the fish (so it was also translated as "Latimer fish"). The name of a local river, Chalumna, was used as the name of its species, and it is still used today.
<h1>Professor Smith: A heavy bounty is offered to catch a second live speartail</h1> fish
When Professor Smith's paper was published, it immediately caused a shock to the scientific community, and people believed that there must not be only one fish, so they looked for the whereabouts of this fish everywhere. In addition, Professor Smith also printed a large number of leaflets with images of this coelacanth fish, and wrote in English, French and Portuguese "Reward 100 pounds for those who find this fish", which were scattered along the Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts of Africa. Smith himself was looking everywhere, even using the South African Prime Minister's private jet to participate in the search.
However, soon after the outbreak of World War II, the whole world fell into the whirlpool of war, so the search for the Latima fish was gradually forgotten, only Professor Smith did not forget, let alone discouraged, when the war was just over, he immediately threw himself into the search for the Latima fish.
More than a decade later, Professor Smith still hasn't found anything. It was not until December 20, 1952, that Smith suddenly received a telegram from Eric Hunt from a place in the Comoros called Dza oudzi, which said: "Just caught a coelacanth about 5 feet long, and the body of the fish has been injected with formalin...".
After 14 years, a second Ratima fish was finally found. The fish was quickly transported to the eager Professor Smith, and after fourteen long years, looking at the box containing the Ratimi fish in front of him, the professor was full of emotions...
In the days that followed, the fish was discovered in the vicinity of the Comoros islands, with more than 90 fish caught so far.
Subsequently, after the research of scientists, it was found that the pectoral fin of this fish can achieve almost all aspects of rotation and support posture, which also confirms the important inference of the evolution from fin to limb, supports the view that the total fin fish is the ancestor of tetrapods, and also provides more natural information for the study of the evolution from fish to humans.
They were born in the ocean 400 million years ago, and one of them continued to adapt to life on land as the environment changed, and finally continued to find that it eventually evolved into humans. The other has never left the water, they have been swimming in the ancient ocean for 400 million years, and we hope that they will continue to swim in the ocean, on the same planet as us...
Wen | stinks
Word count | 2296
Resources:
Visit the island of Grande Comoros, the home of the Latimer fish
Fish evolved
The epic of species evolution - a long talk about speartail fish
The great event in the history of biological development - fish landed on land
The story of the discovery of a "living fossil" – a speartail fish
This kind of fish named after the beautiful little sister, without it, there would be no Lu Jing, who is now |