In the Eighties we thought we could do anything. Some set out to build fortunes, others went off to win wars. I embarked on a five year program to capture a fish and then a ten year effort to help keep that same fish from extinction. This wasn't just any fish. My quest was and is the fabled coelacanth ("see-la-canth"), rarest of creatures, which lives in the depths of the Indian Ocean, far across the world.

And why a fish? What of fishes? We are descended from fishes, if you believe as I do in evolution. Long before knowing, our skulls and brains first appeared in fishes. Eons before we stood, breathed and looked about, our backbones, lungs, eyes, our sense of smell, ears, guts, mouths, jaws, hearts, the saline solution that courses through our veins, and ultimately the limbs with which we walked from the waters were all born of fishes.

When life first came ashore on lobed-finned feet she made a giant leap to a new dimension, a leap that has been matched only in our own time by the first men who stepped on the moon. And like the Space Race there were contenders for that terrestrial prize 400 million years ago. Lung fishes, coelacanths, and a creature called eusthenopteron were each adaptively poised to leave the water.

Which of these three--or others still unknown-- became our first land ancestor is still an unsettled question. Eusthenopteron evolved himself out of existence making him a strong contender. His early cousins, the lung fishes, still survive along muddy stretches of river in Australia, Africa, and South America. While the coelacanth, long believed extinct, produced a living marine form virtually unchanged from its earliest 400 million year old fossils.

The living coelacanth, a snapshot of our earliest origins, cast a spell on my life in 1985; seducing me, siren-like, from an ordered, work-a-day existence in the city, to embark on a tantalizing, obsessive, odyssey among distant jagged isles; in search of his elusive kin and the secrets they guarded from science. This is the story of that adventure: its highs and lows, personalities and politics, the ironies of fate and the caprices of nature --all that conspired as I rolled up my life and went crazy for that fish.