According to foreign media reports on May 20, a strange fish was recently discovered in the Indian Ocean, which has been identified by scientists as a fish species that has long been extinct, and they believe that the fish species should have become extinct along with dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago. This strange fish can be called a living fossil, I don't know if eating a bite will live for a hundred years.
Mongabay, a nonprofit environmental science news platform based in the United States, recently discovered this rare species of coelacan in south Africa off the coast of Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean, and was later named Latimeria chalumnae.
The coelacanth is a flexible, fin-like carnivorous fish known as the "four-legged fossil fish" and is thought to be related to the distant ancestors of the Earth's tetrapods. Its earliest life on Earth dates back 420 million years, and its fish structure has not changed significantly in hundreds of millions of years. The coelacanth is generally thought to live in submarine canyons, at underwater depths between 100 and 500 m and weighing up to 90 kg.
The news of the reconvening of the coelacanth shocked the scientific community at the time, and some scientists even thought that the impact of the discovery was similar to the discovery of a living dinosaur wandering on earth at this moment. On 22 December 1938, Courtney-Latimer of the Museum in East London, South Africa, came to a trawler, many of which were scattered on deck, and she found a very strange fish, about one meter and five meters long. She wrote, "I noticed a blue fin sticking out from under that pile of stuff." "I unveiled the specimen and saw the most beautiful fish I've ever seen."
Since then, more fishermen have caught this coelacanth along the coastlines of South Africa, Tanzania and the Comoros, and then discovered another, more rare latimeria menadoensis in Indonesian waters, which scientists currently believe only survive on Earth, because they live in the deep sea and are not completely extinct, but the coelacanth that originally lived in shallow waters did indeed perish with the dinosaurs.
According to a new study, as of May 2020, there are no less than 334 reports of coelacanth catches. Andrew Cooke, lead author of the study, told Meng Gabe: "When we looked further, we (the numbers captured) were shocked ... Although Malagasy does not actively monitor or protect coelacanths," the study also reiterates that coelacanths are at risk of extinction at any time as shark hunting behavior increases.
Image credit: Yahoo, People, Internet
This article is the subject of: Ginger Emperor Penguin. Editor: Yanniyang