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00:00In the waters of the east coast of South Africa, 300 feet below the surface, divers search for a creature that existed before the time of the dinosaurs, a living fossil.
00:27350, 400 million years old.
00:33Some call it the ghost fish, king of the sea, others monster of the deep.
00:40On a moonless but fairly bright night, you can actually see those eyes glowing.
00:49For over half a century, the search has persisted.
00:52There have been divers who've died trying to find these fish.
00:57Those who come in contact with it are changed forever.
01:01You get this kind of science fiction chill in the back of your neck and going down your spine.
01:07A creature that offers tantalizing clues to the evolution of all life on earth, including us.
01:14I did see one alive and I never got over that.
01:20A creature thought to have been extinct for over 50 million years.
01:24It's alive!
01:25It's alive!
01:26It's alive!
01:27It's alive!
01:28Ancient creature of the deep.
01:32Up next on NOVA.
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01:48Stick to that road to something different.
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01:50Corporate funding for NOVA is provided by Sprint.
01:53The Park Foundation kole Lalarını Cloudaster так of field.
01:54Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation, dedicated to education and quality television.
02:02And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
02:10Transcription by CastingWords
02:40These are always dangerous. Rescue divers are in place. An emergency medical team hovers nearby.
02:49Each diver carries several tanks, different compressed gases, to breathe at different depths. Any mix-up here could be fatal.
03:01This is my oxygen. It's closed. I cannot breathe at depths deeper than 10 meters. This is air to travel down.
03:08And on my back I have the helium mixture to breathe at depth.
03:13Everything is planned down to the minute.
03:15Our total dive is going to take us exactly two hours.
03:19So 15 minutes down and on the bottom, and then the rest of the time coming up.
03:24For a quarter of an hour, they drift down through a world ever quieter, ever colder, ever darker.
03:51Then, at a depth of 300 feet, something catches their eye.
04:00We saw the continental drop-off. We headed straight for it. We saw a cave.
04:12We went straight into that cave. Just looked underneath it. There he was.
04:18A great primitive fish. A coelacanth.
04:25Its ancestors date back 400 million years, to a time when all Earth's creatures lived underwater.
04:33And the great transition to living on land, was about to begin.
04:43Was the coelacanth, with its fleshy, leg-like fins, the missing link in evolution from fish to land animals?
04:50Coelacanths were long considered extinct, known to science only through ancient fossils, that displayed these curious, limb-like fins.
05:02But one fateful day in 1938, everything changed.
05:09Hello, welcome. Welcome to Six Lake Street. Come to me.
05:13Marjorie Courtney Latimer was then the 31-year-old curator of a small natural history museum in East London, South Africa.
05:21Come, welcome in.
05:22Welcome in.
05:24She remembers well how her life was turned upside down by the mysterious coelacanth.
05:32Nobody ever knew the difficulties and the trauma that I went through.
05:37I went through absolute trauma saving that fish.
05:42Because nobody wanted to know.
05:45I would say even my family in the end began to think I was cuckoo.
05:48I suppose I was very cuckoo.
05:59On December 22nd, 1938, a fishing trawler steamed into the East London harbour.
06:10On the deck was a pile of sea life dredged up after a freak storm.
06:14But these fish were not all meant for market.
06:17It was a pile of sponges and starfish and rat-tailed fish and you name it, they were there.
06:29When putting together new exhibits at the museum, Marjorie often obtained samples from local fishermen.
06:35And from underneath this crowd there was this one fin sticking out.
06:46This blue fin.
06:48And I thought, what on earth could this be?
06:52Then I moved all the fish.
06:54There was this beautiful, beautiful fish.
06:56There was iridescent colours all over the fish.
07:01Just solid, just on five foot long.
07:06Rough scales.
07:08And very big eyes.
07:11Very big blue eyes.
07:13These peculiar limb-like fins.
07:17Something I'd never seen in a fish in my life.
07:19Marjorie had been an avid collector since childhood.
07:24She knew instinctively that this was an important find.
07:29I thought, no, whatever happens, this fish has got to be saved.
07:36Although she was able to cart the fish back to the museum, this was 1938.
07:40And there was no easy way to refrigerate and preserve the specimen.
07:47She inquired at the local mortuary.
07:50And so I went in, and this really tall, really gaunt-looking gentleman said,
07:55what could he do for me?
07:57So I said, you know, I've got this beautiful fish.
08:00And I said, I have to try and save it.
08:04And I wondered if you could put it into the mortuary.
08:06So he drew himself up, right nearly up to the roof.
08:11And he said, I've never heard of such an iniquitous suggestion.
08:16Most definitely not.
08:18Most definitely not.
08:20In desperation, she sent off a note and a sketch to a professor at Rhodes University,
08:26a hundred miles away in Grahamstown.
08:28Professor J.L.B. Smith was trained as a chemist, but his passion was ichthyology, the study of fish.
08:39His work in this field would soon change the face of science.
08:43Let me take you to L4.
08:46Professor Smith's one-time secretary and archivist is Jean Pote.
08:50This is it.
08:52This is a very interesting file.
08:55It's correspondence with Marjorie Courtney Latimer from 1936 onwards.
09:00And in this file is, I think, the original drawing.
09:06That is the original drawing by Marjorie Courtney Latimer.
09:16And as soon as he saw that, he knew that it was something really rare.
09:25For J.L.B. Smith, it was more than rare.
09:28It was an impossibility.
09:31If that drawing were correct, this fish should have died out with the dinosaurs.
09:40Smith's wife, Margaret, described his reaction.
09:44It was the 3rd of January, 1939.
09:47And I suddenly felt almost shockwaves coming from my husband,
09:51who was standing up reading a letter.
09:53And through the back of the letter, I could see a picture of a fish.
09:58And he pointed to the drawing of the tail.
10:02And he said, you see that tail?
10:04That tail belongs to fishes that have been extinct for millions and millions of years.
10:14Smith was confused and puzzled.
10:17He almost hoped he was wrong about the identification of this creature.
10:20But if he was right, the implications were staggering.
10:25Despite his initial excitement, he was unable to examine the fish in person for nearly two months,
10:32leaving Marjorie Courtney Latimer to deal with this strange creature alone.
10:36He probably thought I was making a mistake.
10:41Although I had sketched it.
10:44And I had written all these letters to him about it.
10:47But he probably thought, you know, I was young and inexperienced with ichthyology.
10:54It's a funny thing to just suddenly decide about.
10:57Bring a fossil fish out into the open.
11:00Marjorie was left with no choice.
11:04In order to save the fish for scientific study, she had it skinned and mounted.
11:10But without any preservatives, the internal organs had to be discarded.
11:16This was later described by Smith as one of the most terrible tragedies in science.
11:21So there were a lot of confusions in the beginning, and I got blamed for losing the innards of a fish.
11:34I had to bear that all my life.
11:38But still, the main thing was, we saved the skin and the tarp specimen.
11:51On the 16th of February, at 10 o'clock, Professor Smith walked into my office.
11:59I've been waiting for him since the 22nd of December.
12:03That first sight hit me like a white-hot blast, Smith later wrote.
12:10It made me feel shaky and queer, my body tingled.
12:14I stood as if stricken to stone.
12:17And he walked round the table.
12:20And he said, this, this fish will be on the lips of every scientist in the world.
12:28It's a coelacanth.
12:29Since J.L.B. Smith identified the strange fish, he was able to christen it.
12:39He named the genus Latimeria, after the woman who had saved the fish for science.
12:45And the species, Calumni, after the river near where it was caught.
12:48The press went wild with the news, calling it the most important scientific discovery of the century.
12:56A creature from a group thought to be extinct for millions of years, was alive.
13:01It was a living fossil, a window into the past.
13:09The term, living fossil, had been coined by Darwin.
13:14In his writings on evolution, he argued that somewhere, most likely in the ocean depths,
13:19some creatures would have eluded the pressures to evolve and changed little from prehistoric times.
13:28Now, here was a living coelacanth, strikingly similar to fossils more than 50 million years old.
13:35Well, we're down in the basement of the museum now, and the fossil fish collection is through here.
13:51Let's open the door.
13:52John Masey is a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
13:57The collection is arranged in a systematic sequence, or an evolutionary sequence.
14:04And the coelacanth fossils we keep in these cabinets.
14:10For example, here are some small coelacanths from right around here.
14:19These probably live in fresh water. These are about a shade over 200 million years old.
14:24Now, these didn't get much bigger than this.
14:28These coelacanths lived at a time when North America was still attached to Africa.
14:34So, New York could have been very close to Morocco at this time.
14:40Coelacanths first appeared, along with the other major groups of fishes we know today,
14:45about 400 million years ago.
14:47Then, the Earth was more or less one large land mass.
14:55Over time, this supercontinent separated into what is now essentially the modern globe,
15:02leaving coelacanth fossils on every continent except Antarctica.
15:06These fossils had been known to science since the 1830s.
15:14They'd been found in widely varying sizes, but with several distinguishing features.
15:20An oddly hinged joint in the head.
15:24Fins that had a limb-like structure.
15:27And hollow fin rays supporting the distinctive tail.
15:34The oddly spelled name comes from the Greek, meaning hollow spine.
15:40J.L.B. Smith wrote that finding a living coelacanth was like walking down the street and running into a dinosaur.
15:50Scientists were skeptical that the fish in East London was a true living fossil.
16:06Even Smith worried that perhaps the coelacanth had lain somewhere in the ocean bed,
16:11in some preserving ooze or mud, these millions of years.
16:14But Marjorie soon assured him that the fish had snapped at its captors before dying.
16:23The press played up the idea of a missing link,
16:26an idea also derived from Darwin's theory of evolution.
16:32Darwin proposed that life came out of the sea,
16:35evolving from fishes to amphibians to mammals to us,
16:40over millions of years.
16:42Was the coelacanth a missing link?
16:46That interim step from water to land?
16:49Was this fish the key to understanding our own evolution?
16:59All life came from the sea.
17:02And when we realize that life is really just an evolution of forms,
17:07these are the closest relatives to our ancestors,
17:12and then we, intellectually, would like to know who was the closest,
17:16who was the missing link?
17:18John McCosker is an evolutionary biologist at the California Academy of Sciences.
17:23We're dying to know what was that step from the fishes to the amphibians.
17:28And when they discovered coelacanth fossils, they said,
17:31aha, it must be this, this thing that walked out of the water.
17:35And when they discovered the living fossil, they said, that's it, our ancestor, it's alive.
17:40But Marjorie's fish was all they had, and it was only skin and bones.
17:49The innards had been lost.
17:51And we were by such unfortunate circumstances prevented from being able to find out what most of its body and organs were like.
17:58Were the coelacanth's internal organs like those of other fishes, or more like those of amphibians, reptiles and mammals?
18:11It therefore became more than normally desirable, really imperative to find more.
18:18This would become J.L.B. Smith's life's work, to find another coelacanth, and this time, an intact specimen.
18:25J.L.B. Smith was a hard man.
18:30He was a very, very focused man, and that tended to turn people off who didn't share his point of view.
18:38Mike Bruton works today as an ecologist here in South Africa.
18:42He studied under J.L.B. Smith.
18:45Well, J.L.B. was a remarkable fisherman, and actually predicted that the first coelacanth
18:53didn't naturally live off East London, that it was a more tropical, deep-water animal.
18:59Smith felt certain that if coelacanths were native to the highly fished waters off East London,
19:05they would have been caught many times before.
19:08He reasoned that Marjorie's fish inhabited the deep, tropical reefs to the north,
19:13and had been driven toward East London by currents running down through the Mozambique Channel.
19:18So he distributed leaflets all over the East African coast.
19:23Smith's leaflets in English, French, and Portuguese offered a hundred-pound reward,
19:32an enormous sum for a local fisherman.
19:34But he still faced tremendous odds against finding a second specimen.
19:42After all, the coelacanth had proved amazingly adept at eluding discovery.
19:52J.L.B. was a fisherman, a mad fisherman.
19:55As with the first specimen, caught by trawler fishermen, Smith was counting on those who made a living from the sea.
20:04It's very fresh.
20:05And like Smith, biologist John McCosker knows where to ask when looking for a particular fish.
20:11These men are the best ichthyologists, I'm sure.
20:14I'm sure they know the differences between, the subtle differences between, well, different species, different populations.
20:22If you wanted to find rare fish, you don't go to an ichthyologist or a museum.
20:28You go to a fish market.
20:30And these guys know fish. I mean, it's their whole life is fish.
20:35The fishermen of the Camaros Islands would prove to be a godsend for J.L.B. Smith.
20:40The Camaros are a small group of volcanic islands, then controlled by the French, just north of Madagascar.
20:55Here, men have fished in the same way for over a thousand years,
21:00and were said occasionally to pull out of the water a fish they called gombessa.
21:05Comoran fishermen had no idea this fish might shed light on one of the greatest scientific mysteries of all time.
21:16But the substantial reward caught everyone's attention.
21:19Then, in December 1952, from the Comoros, Smith got the telegram he'd hoped and prayed for, for 14 years.
21:35It came from an English sea trader he'd met in Madagascar, Eric Hunt.
21:42Have five-foot specimen coelacanth.
21:47Injected formalin here.
21:50Killed 20th. Advise.
21:56Smith was beside himself.
21:58Did Hunt have enough preservative?
21:59It would take weeks to reach the Camaros by boat.
22:03By then, the fish might putrefy.
22:06He'd not spent all these years searching to let this specimen slip away.
22:11Smith turned to his connections in the South African government to try to borrow a plane.
22:17Finally, calling on the Prime Minister himself, D.F. Milan.
22:21Milan was at his beach cottage in 1952 when he got that famous phone call from J.L.B. Smith, and he realized that J.L.B. Smith had something important to tell him, that South Africa's prestige was at stake.
22:34As a South African, Mike Bruton remembers the story of the second coelacanth well.
22:39And, as a result, Milan eventually gave permission for that military Dakota to fly to the Camores, since been described as a sort of military aeroplane going to a foreign country taking a mad scientist to fetch a dead fish.
22:58Well, this is Dakota 6832, the one that we flew to fetch the coelacanth in 1952.
23:06Major General Duncan Ralston was a lieutenant at the time, and the senior navigator on the flight that took J.L.B. Smith to the Camorros.
23:16Professor Smith actually sat about here, and he was so tense and so excited.
23:23We had a long flight over the sea, with almost no navigation aids, but we landed, and there was the fish.
23:36The fish smelled strongly of the formaldehyde Hunt had used to try to preserve it.
23:42And it was a bit the worse for wear, having been carted across the island by the fishermen who caught it.
23:49Nevertheless, after 14 years of searching, Smith finally had his coelacanth.
23:55I could not bring myself to touch it, and I knelt down to look, and I'm not ashamed to say that after all that long strain, I wept.
24:10Professor Smith insisted that we get this fish back to the aeroplane and take off as quickly as possible.
24:27I'm not sure to this day whether we did in fact have proper diplomatic clearance to land at the island, or to take the fish away.
24:36I know subsequently the French government were enormously cross about the whole affair, because they felt it belonged to them.
24:43So we flew back, we had to fly the fish down to Cape Town, because Dr. Malon wanted to see it.
24:53Dr. Malon said, when he saw the fish, why, it's very ugly, and is this where we came from?
24:59Dr. Malon was a creationist, and the father of South African apartheid.
25:07Aiding Smith in his evolutionary research was dangerous politically.
25:14But South Africa's prestige was at stake, and Malon welcomed the publicity.
25:20Dr. Malon was a creationist, and the father of South African apartheid.
25:24This is Movie Joe, Donald Marson reporting.
25:29Meet Professor Smith of Grahamstown, South Africa, with a model of that famous fish, the coelacan.
25:35Coelacanths are close relatives of the fish that scientists consider as the ancestor of all land animals.
25:42The coelacanths have lived for probably 350 million years, and in that time they have changed but little.
25:49Yes, the professor says the fish is a kind of ancestor of man. Poor fish.
25:58In his lab, Smith began the first ever dissection of a coelacanth, peering into a world never before accessible to science.
26:08What he discovered was that the coelacanth is different in many ways from all other modern fish.
26:14Not only did it have strange limb-like fins, it had no real backbone.
26:21Instead, Smith found a more primitive structure called a notochord.
26:26This is part of the notochord of the coelacanth that was dissected here.
26:31And it's simply a hollow tube, it's a gristly tube, which extends from just behind the brain right through into the tail.
26:42And it's filled with a light oil under a very slight pressure.
26:48This kind of oil-filled skeletal structure is unique.
26:51Most adult vertebrates have well-developed backbones, especially those that live on land, including human beings.
27:02The entire fish is filled with oil.
27:05There's not a single air sinus in the fish.
27:08So, like a diver's depth gauge, it's incompressible.
27:12Which, in theory anyway, would allow it to swim on depths of a thousand meters or more.
27:17But it was the limb-like fins that really caught the attention of Smith and the world.
27:25They had their own internal skeleton, more like our limbs than the fins of a normal fish.
27:31As you see, the fins are more like paddles than ordinary fins.
27:37Indeed, our arms were developed from a pectoral fin like that of this fish.
27:44I have no doubt that this fish falls about on the bottom quite easily.
27:49Once again, the press trumpeted the coelacanth as the missing link.
27:57A creature that bridged the gap between fish and primitive land animals.
28:03Scientists, museums, even zoos now wanted their own coelacanth.
28:09The London Zoo offered a reward of a thousand pounds for a live specimen.
28:14Smith capitalized on the excitement surrounding his find.
28:20He wrote a book, Old Four Legs, and created a legend.
28:28Through Old Four Legs, which is one of the great scientific books of all time,
28:33he captured the public imagination partly because it's a fantastic fish.
28:37But I think we must also give credit to JLB for a really good marketing exercise.
28:42He weaved the human story, all the intrigues of the Comores.
28:47I mean, he's working with a South African prime minister who didn't believe in evolution,
28:52and made the coelacanth story come alive for people,
28:56gave them an entree into this fantastic scientific world from which most people are excluded.
29:01Through his research and his book, Smith's name became forever tied to the coelacanth,
29:08like Marjorie Courtney Latimer's.
29:11But what of the Comoran fishermen who actually caught the fish?
29:15He's seen here getting his reward.
29:18His name is Ahmed Hussain.
29:20This is the first time he's been interviewed.
29:31Hussain says he never met Smith,
29:34but recognizes his fish.
29:38He's the first time he's been interviewed.
29:43Husain says he never met Smith,
29:46but recognizes his fish.
29:48He says he got the reward, but other fishermen took credit for the catch.
29:54It seems that they never wanted to see him.
30:01Until this moment, not even Hussain's own neighbors knew what he'd done.
30:07But his catch, back in 1952, put the Comoros on the scientific map.
30:12From then on, this tiny archipelago would be acknowledged as the prime location for finding Latimeria Calumni.
30:22As the islands were then under French colonial rule, an international embargo was declared.
30:30Comoran fishermen, using the same time-honored methods of hook and line, would catch many more coelacanths.
30:40They would all be sent to France.
30:42For the next 23 years, the coelacanth was almost exclusively studied in the Department of Comparative Anatomy,
30:52here at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.
30:54Daniel Rabineau was part of the team of scientists which conducted the first comprehensive dissections of Latimeria using properly preserved specimens.
31:06This is one of the many specimens we received from the Comoros.
31:15A cut was made across the head, giving us access to the inside of the skull.
31:21One can see very clearly the most interior part of the notochord.
31:29The French team found a series of contradictory features.
31:32In some ways, the coelacanth looked very primitive, with organs and glands similar to those of sharks and rays.
31:42And a tiny heart, which is little more than an expansion in the main blood vessel.
31:49In other ways, the coelacanth resembled tetrapods, those four-limbed creatures that include everything from the very first land dwellers to human beings.
31:59There are several characteristics that show similarities to tetrapods.
32:10There's the presence of a vestigial lung.
32:15And of course, here are the lobed fins.
32:20And here, on this X-ray, we can see the vein that brings the abdominal blood back up to the heart.
32:29This vessel is a genuine vena cava, like that found in tetrapods.
32:34The vascular system of almost all other fishes is completely different.
32:38So was the coelacanth the closest living relative of tetrapods? The missing link?
32:49Some scientists said yes, others no, as they continued to explore this mysterious creature's anatomy.
32:56Its brain, which unfortunately you can't see, is incredibly small.
33:03The brain case is probably about that size, but the brain itself is no bigger than the end segment of one's thumb.
33:13In the snout of the fish, a strange jelly-filled cavity was discovered.
33:18It initially puzzled researchers, but is now thought to be an elaborate electro-receptive organ.
33:23And we believe that this is used to detect minute electrical impulses put out by prey organisms.
33:32Its eye, in life, looks much bigger than that, and it's like a crystal ball.
33:38It's as clear, clear, clear as anything.
33:41And comorins say that coelacanths have fire in its eyes.
33:47And that's because it collects any light that's available and reflects it back, rather like a cat's eyes at night.
33:53These specialized features may help to explain why coelacanths have survived for 400 million years.
34:09Their outward appearance has changed little.
34:14But internally, they must have adapted to changing environments, as the Earth itself was transformed over time.
34:21Whether the remarkable features of Latimeria developed 4 million years ago, or 40, or 400, we may never know.
34:34But it has found its niche, and continues to avoid extinction.
34:38Thanks, in part, to two other crucial adaptations.
34:44Its advanced method of reproduction, and its extremely low metabolism.
34:49So they wouldn't need much food.
34:51They're living, in fact, in a low food environment.
34:55There isn't a whole lot of food around for them.
34:57And this may have something to do with their long survival.
35:00They have adapted to this low food environment.
35:02Phil Heemstra has been studying coelacanths for over two decades, and has been fascinated by the way they reproduce.
35:12It looks like an orange, but it's actually a model of a coelacanth egg.
35:18This is a life-size model.
35:20They have the largest eggs known amongst fishes.
35:23The huge coelacanth eggs, filled with nutrients to feed the growing embryo, were discovered by the French in 1955.
35:32They were, at first, thought to be released and fertilized on the ocean floor.
35:37Until a freshly dissected specimen yielded a surprise.
35:41In 1975, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York,
35:46they found a pregnant female, with five babies inside her.
35:50So then we knew they had internal fertilization, and they gave birth to living young, like sharks did.
35:58Here's a model of one of those five babies.
36:00And each of them still had a large yolk sac, although the fins are fairly well developed.
36:05As you can see, the scales are developed.
36:07Although fossils had shown tiny coelacanths inside an adult,
36:11researchers couldn't tell if the adult was about to give birth, or had eaten the little ones.
36:17Now they knew.
36:18Coelacanths give birth to live young, and have done so for 200 million years.
36:25Well before mammals came along, the coelacanth was using a mammal-like reproductive strategy, ensuring that most of its young would survive.
36:35After decades of research, much had been learned.
36:43But well into the 1980s, no one had ever observed a coelacanth alive for more than a few hours.
36:49The coelacanth lives in deep, cold water, where the oxygen content is high.
36:57When one is caught, and brought to the warmer, less oxygen-rich surface water, it cannot survive very long.
37:03Especially with the stress of capture.
37:07Even today, aquariums have been unsuccessful in capturing and keeping a coelacanth alive.
37:14So no one knew how they mate, how they hunt, how they elude predators in their natural habitat.
37:22There was only one way to find out.
37:25Go to them, in a submersible.
37:29Nothing more than a motorized decompression chamber.
37:34The man responsible for this chamber is Hans Fricke, a zoologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
37:41He's been obsessed with the coelacanth since childhood.
37:46And we thought that the coelacanths occur deeper than 200 meters, and this was the reason that we built Yago.
37:56Yago was custom-made by its pilot, Jürgen Schauer.
38:00You have five lights. Each light has a power of 250 watts, so you can impose sunlight on the seabed.
38:10And we have five little thrusters.
38:13These side ones are rotatable.
38:15And we have three in the back for propulsion, with which we can make a speed of about walking speed.
38:23It's about one mile an hour.
38:25Yago was brought to the deep blue waters of the Camoros, where, along with biologist Karin Hiesmann, Fricke and Schauer could pursue the coelacanth.
38:39One day in 1987, after hunting the fish for weeks to no avail, Fricke was called back to Germany, leaving Jürgen Schauer to continue the ever more frustrating search.
38:54We were already quite desperate already, everybody on the ship.
39:02Then, at 9 p.m. on the 17th of January, at a depth of 600 feet, there it was.
39:09A coelacanth.
39:17We did not know how the fish would behave.
39:20Usually, the fish swim away when they see the strong lights of Yago.
39:24But this fish didn't care about the lights.
39:29It's so large, and it's moving in such a different way than other fish do,
39:34which makes it really a spectacular experience to discover a fish like this.
39:44Schauer immediately radioed Fricke with the exciting news.
39:49Jürgen called me with a ship radio, and I said to him,
39:53give everybody a kiss, I give you a bottle of champagne, and so on, and so on.
39:57I was very, very enthusiastic about it.
40:05And on the end of the conversation, the operator said,
40:10what the hell is this, what you are talking about?
40:13I said, the coelacanth.
40:15And he asked me, what is a coelacanth?
40:18I said, it's an old, ugly, oily fish.
40:25As expected, coelacanths were found to live in a fairly uninhabited ecosystem,
40:30and seem to have no real predators.
40:34They aggregate during the day in volcanic caves,
40:38and at night have been known to migrate to depths of over 2,000 feet.
40:47But unexpectedly, films of the coelacanth showed how the multiple fins function,
40:52and laid to rest the idea of a crawling fish first put forward by J.L.B. Smith.
40:57Smith said, yeah, they are creeping on the bottom, like seals, and of course they don't.
41:06They are not walking, they are continually hovering above the ground.
41:15The coelacanth moves unlike any other fish of this size.
41:18Its oil-filled body allows it to maintain neutral buoyancy and float in any position.
41:26Six fins are almost constantly in motion, like oars in the water.
41:32Upper and lower fins toward the rear of the creature,
41:36plus two pairs of limb-like fins, front and center.
41:39And there was something surprising about the way these limb-like fins moved.
41:46Although the coelacanth was not using them to crawl on the bottom,
41:51to the expert eye, their motion hinted at walking.
41:55Walking like we do.
42:02According to Susan Jewett, the fish collection manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,
42:10and an international expert in coelacanth biology.
42:13It's got paired pectoral fins and paired pelvic fins.
42:20These are particularly interesting because this fish has what's called a tetrapod form of swimming.
42:28We, being tetrapods, have all learned that when we walk,
42:33we move the right arm forward in synchrony with the left leg.
42:35Well, the fish sort of swims like that, with that right pectoral and the left pelvic going in synchrony with one another.
42:43Very interesting characteristics, which again is one of very many characteristics that place it in that evolutionary line towards higher vertebrates.
42:53If the coelacanth swims like a land animal walks, does that too suggest it's our closest living relative among the fishes?
43:08To this day, the evidence is inconclusive.
43:12Until recently, most researchers put coelacanths nearest to tetrapods on an evolutionary tree.
43:18But now, a group known as lungfish is thought to be an even closer ancestor, based on new DNA evidence.
43:28We may never know for certain which group of fishes contains our closest living relative.
43:34Still, the coelacanth continues to surprise science at every turn.
43:396,000 miles from the Camoros, on the other side of the Indian Ocean in Indonesia,
43:49the sudden discovery of a coelacanth would disrupt the lives of two young scientists.
43:55An uncanny echo of the events in South Africa some 60 years before.
44:01Mark Erdman, a marine biologist studying coral shrimp,
44:07and Arnaz Mehta, a naturalist, had just started a life together as husband and wife here in Indonesia,
44:14when the coelacanth made its unexpected appearance.
44:20It all began in the local fish market,
44:23when Mark and Arnaz, stepping out of a taxi, spotted a strange looking fish on a fish cart.
44:28I went over to the cart, and I stared at this fish, thinking it was a grouper at first,
44:35but then the head was all wrong, and everything was wrong about it.
44:38And then I called Mark over, and our other two friends, they came and looked at it,
44:42and Mark, sort of in disbelief, said it was a sale account.
44:46It just seemed really kind of incredulous that we could step out of a taxi in a city of over half a million people
44:53and see something that was really a big deal, go wheeling by on a fish cart.
44:59They took a photograph, but did not purchase the fish,
45:03thinking Indonesian coelacanths were already well known to science.
45:07But they soon learned the uniqueness of their sighting.
45:11No scientist had ever found a coelacanth, except near South Africa and the Comoros Islands.
45:16Mark and Arnaz quickly embarked on a quest to find a second specimen.
45:24Like J.L.B. Smith before them, they enlisted the aid of local fishermen.
45:30A new hunt was on for the elusive coelacanth.
45:33As in the Comoros, this fish was known locally.
45:40Fishermen called it Raja Lout, King of the Sea.
45:45Mark wanted to make sure that if one was captured again by these fishermen,
45:51that he would be able to get it.
45:53So we offered a very modest reward, rather.
45:56I think it was perhaps double the market price.
45:58And it's not a good eating fish, so the market price couldn't have been very high.
46:02But it was enough to entice the fishermen to bring it to him when they caught it.
46:07And that's exactly what happened.
46:13Then, ten months after the initial sighting, Mark and Arnaz had a visit.
46:19And my boatman showed up, and he burst out,
46:24Atta Raja Lout, come quickly, there's a coelacanth on the beach.
46:27We rushed down the stairs, Arnaz grabbed the video camera,
46:31and we went down to see if this was indeed the fish.
46:36Like all of its predecessors, the creature soon found life at the surface impossible.
46:45But before the great fish died, the couple took it out to deeper water,
46:55to get photographs in a more natural setting.
46:57Arnaz even had a few moments to swim alongside.
47:07The fish had been caught several hours earlier, and it was really down to its final hour.
47:12During that time, you know, her fins were still moving, still flouncing,
47:15and then her dorsal fin would raise, and then once in a while she would take a big gulp of water.
47:21And she was extremely calm in her inevitable demise.
47:29I couldn't get over how beautiful her scales were.
47:32There are these, you know, these scales that were speckled with these gold flecks.
47:36And it was like, it was like a slow dance.
47:43It's certainly sad to watch such a majestic beast die so slowly.
47:47So slowly.
47:58When DNA samples of the Indonesian coelacanth were sequenced,
48:03they suggested that this was a new species,
48:06and dissuaded scientists from the idea that the Indonesian fish was a stray.
48:10In fact, from the DNA analysis, it seems that the two populations were separated many millions of years ago.
48:23Once again, the mysterious fossil fish surprised scientists around the world.
48:31The Indonesian discovery upset the whole apple cart.
48:34Science was all nice and happy that got these little enclaves in the Camors all sorted out,
48:41and that anything that was outside that was a stray.
48:44Now all of a sudden, 10,000 kilometers away, right across the other side of the Indian Ocean,
48:49we have another colony of coelacans.
48:51And it's not just one or two, it's not strays, it's a colony.
48:55They are known to the Indonesian fishermen.
48:57Which suggests to me that they're actually far more widespread than we think.
49:02The fact that we could find this animal in a place that's relatively well known to ichthyologists,
49:09it would not surprise me in the least if over the next 50 or 100 years
49:14that it is revealed that the coelacanth actually exists pretty much in one continuous population
49:20from the Western Indian Ocean all the way up to Indonesia.
49:32J.L.B. Smith didn't live to hear the story of the Indonesian coelacanth.
49:43In 1968, after years of ill health and in constant pain, Smith took his own life.
49:52He was 70 years old.
50:02Marjorie Courtney Latimer celebrated her 93rd birthday in February 2000.
50:07She was the first in a long chain of people whose lives were touched by this ancient fish.
50:20I think that all my life I was called to do what I did in my life.
50:32And it all came as a wonderful kind of circle of events, finding this wonderful fish.
50:40There's something about the ancient nature of this fish and the story that goes with it that intrigues people so much and pulls them in.
50:54It's just something magical about it.
50:56I first saw the coelacanth probably in about 1956.
51:02The original mounted specimen in the East London Museum.
51:06To me it was this fantastic creature from the past which gave us a window into the past
51:12and made us kind of realize life began in the sea.
51:16From the sea the vertebrate, the backbone animals crawled out onto land
51:21and that's where the evolution of terrestrial vertebrates started.
51:24The final riddle.
51:29The coelacanth may never have stepped onto land.
51:33But if this living fossil was able to avoid extinction and detection for so many millions of years,
51:40what other strange and wonderful creatures may also be down there?
51:45It really does say something about how little we know about the oceans.
51:49Very definitely that goes a long way in explaining the mystique of the coelacanth
51:52and its enrapturing effect on the public.
51:57Because that's kind of a weird thing if you really think about it.
52:02It's just a big ugly old fish.
52:04But there is something more to it.
52:06And it's that quality of the unknown of the deep.
52:10For over half a century, this creature has attracted the scrutiny of scientists worldwide.
52:20Yet so many questions remain unanswered.
52:23Do coelacanths live in all the world's oceans?
52:29How large are their populations?
52:31How long do they live?
52:33Over the next half century, scientists will continue to explore these secrets.
52:39And perhaps more lives will be touched by this mysterious survivor.
52:45The coelacanth is the most famous living fossil in the sea.
52:59But there are others.
53:01And they give us a window into prehistoric worlds.
53:03See them for yourself on NOVA's website at pbs.org or America Online keyword PBS.
53:10To order this show or any other NOVA program for $19.95 plus shipping and handling,
53:34call WGBH Boston Video at 1-800-255-9424.
53:53NOVA is a production of WGBH Boston.
53:57Corporate funding for NOVA is provided by Sprint.
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54:14And by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
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