You could not possibly understand my bizarre desire to seek out a fish halfway round the world, without first knowing something about the protagonists in this fish saga. Let me begin with the fish.

          Compress the four and a half billion year history of our planet into a single year--as Carl Sagan was so fond of doing. You will find that humankind and human civilization comprise only the last few minutes and seconds of December 31st. For the first seven months of the year, from January through July, the planet percolated with the ingredients of life. By August, single celled bacteria and algae were the first standard bearers of evolution. Two months later, on the first of November, sea worms and jellyfish appeared, soon accompanied by sponges, mollusks and shellfish.

          Not until the 18th of November, did the first jawless fishes, resembling today's lamprey eels, squirm in tepid waters. By the 22nd, some had developed true skeletal backbones and jaws. A few of these, including the coelacanths, could waddle along the bottom on fleshy lobbed fins. That was four hundred and ten million years ago, at the beginning of an epoch in earth's history scientists call the Devonian- The Age of Fishes.

          Some scientists believe that at that time, when the earth's land surface consisted of two super continents--Pangea in the northern hemisphere and Gondwana in the southern--all you would ever be was crammed into the genes of a foot-long fresh water lobe-finned inhabitant of lakes and rivers called Eusthenopteron. This leg-finned, air-breathing fish is often credited with making the transition to land, becoming extinct as a species in the process, as it gave rise to the first amphibians 360 million years ago. One scientist has suggested that Eusthenopteron became a land-walker not because he had a yen for terra firma, but rather because he needed to crawl from one river puddle to another during dry seasons. I think of this prosaic account of our terrestrial origins whenever my motorcycle won't start. At bottom, everything comes down to getting about.

                 

          The early coelacanth was similar in appearance and size to Eusthenopteron, but with enough differences to belong to a separate family. While Eusthenopteron apparently did his transforming, Natural Selection never really worked on the coelacanth again. Its incredible survival down to the present furnishes a deja vu of the genetic past of all terrestrial tetrapods, ourselves included. It is the retarded relative of whom one might say "There but for the grace of God go I."

          In hindsight, coelacanths seem like primitive antiques. But not so when they first appeared as small freshwater, inshore predators. They were very racy models, at the apex of evolutionary design. The backbone formed a fluid-filled, cartilaginous tube, which provided a firm yet flexible support for muscles. The sucking maws of jawless predecessors had transformed, through a modification of one of the gill arches, into hinged, rigid structures with teeth on the bottom ridge and upper palate--true jaws. The brain, though still tiny, was encased in a hardened skull, which hinged in the middle to increase the gape of the mouth while feeding. The eyes were well developed with reflecting cells called tapita to enhance night vision. The chambered heart pumped blood in prototype to our own. Two indentations in the snout led into a peculiar cavity, a rostral organ-- perhaps acting as an electro-receptor. Along the sides, a pressure sensitive lateral line was well developed to sense the proximity of other fishes and objects- useful in maneuvering and locating prey. Two back or dorsal fins and one protruding beneath the nape of the tail were complimented by paired lobed pectoral and pelvic fins. These contained in their trunks the bones which in the coelacanth's cousin, Eusthenopteron, later evolved into arms and legs. The scales were thick, and lined with serrated rows of hardened toothpick-point denticles. Perhaps most distinctive of all was the trilobated tail with its extra trunk and fin protruding from the middle. It was this feature that made fossil coelacanths so easily recognizable and helped clinch the case for the first living specimen to be identified.

          Early coelacanths were common in freshwater lakes and rivers throughout much of the world and their fossils have been found from Greenland to Madagascar. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, when amphibians were first slithering about the river banks, coelacanths spawned marine forms that grew larger than their fresh water cousins.

          This entire period was once called "The Age of Fishes," as they are so predominant in the fossil record of the era. Marine coelacanths shared these Paleozoic waters with other predators, including early sharks--quite different in appearance from today's descendants. Armored fishes, called Placoderms, whose heads and upper torsos were sheathed in horny plates, moved by undulating both their bodies and their stretched out, lopsided wisps of tails. Most placoderms were small, but some deep ocean varieties stretched over eight feet.

          Ratfishes nibbled the upper layers of the seabed's dead and dying. Squids and cuttlefishes jetted tail first through the water. Sixteen foot sea scorpions and thirty foot nautiloids, ancestors of today's pearly nautilus, snatched at smaller fishes, who fed in turn on crabs, clams, urchins, chunks of corals, and ubiquitous bivalved brachiopods. Segmented trilobites roiled the bottom, feeding on particles of decay. Coral polyps and sponges built reefs along craggy rock outcrops. Tube worms unfurled fans to filter plankton drifting in the current.

          Most of these animals are long gone, casualties of the mass waves of extinction that have swept the planet over the eons. Others have left descendants in almost unrecognizably different forms. From Eusthenopteron came the amphibians, and from them the reptiles, among whom dinosaurs came to dominate the terrestrial landscape for 150 million years.

          By the time, two hundred and fifteen million years ago, when dinosaurs were taking over on land, there were as many as thirty species of coelacanths. Their fossils are strewn across North America, Europe, Greenland, and particularly Madagascar. One hundred million years later there were fewer than ten species. By then the two mega continents, Pangea and Gondwana, were splitting up, sending the new continental land masses on their tectonic drift across the oceans. The dinosaurs came to an end 65 million years ago, in one of the greatest mass extinctions of all time. During this late Cretaceous extinction, over ninety percent of the earth's fauna, including the dinosaurs, disappeared forever. In the terms of our cosmic calendar analogy, this was at the end of November. All that would be of human evolution and cultural history was still a month away.

          During the 18th and 19th centuries A.D., a rage of plant and animal classifying consumed naturalists. Animals, living and extinct, were sorted out into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Subheadings were added whenever there was a doubt. Coelacanths were just one of dozens of kinds of fossil fishes identified, described and classified. They had no privileged status. The first fossil coelacanth to be described and named was a specimen found near Newcastle in England. The work was done by the famous zoologist Louis Agassiz, in 1836. He combined Greek words for "space" and "spine," coming up with "coelacanthus," to name the fish after its hollow dorsal fin spines. (Ironically, given the present evolutionary significance of this fish, Agassiz would become a leading opponent of Darwin's Theory of Evolution!) The "youngest" coelacanth fossil species to emerge, a 2 foot fish called Macropona, is one hundred million years old. In fact, no fossil coelacanths have been found in rocks younger than the sixty-five million year old Cretaceous sediments which sandwiched the last of the dinosaurs bones. The coelacanths seemed just as extinct.
But were they?