Sometime in 2010 I was in a biology for dummies class titled 'Life On Earth' to get gen ed credit towards my music degree. The class mostly consisted of watching the David Attenbourough series of the same title. The class was run by a scrawny asshole full of dry, biting humor. I loved the class.
The material for the class was presented as the timeline of life on earth, from the first proteins and amino acids up through modern day. One day we were talking about the evolution of fish and how they worked their way out of the water. Let's take a moment to talk about these fish. There are two kinds of fins that can be found on fish, ray fins, and lobe fins. Unless you've seen a Coelacanth you have never seen a lobe finned fish. Why is this important? Well, lobe fin fish have four lobe fins, two up front and two in back, ...and the bone structure shows five tarsals inside the fin.
Ever notice how all animals with fingers and toes have five of them? That's because it was a lobe finned fish that first came out of the water and survived. There are plenty of these fish in the fossil record, but we thought they had been extinct.
That is until 1938 when they were found off the shore of South Africa. The ancient fish lives. It has changed a bit. The one found was a new species, and another species has since been discovered.
Coelacanths live in dark, cold water at high pressure depths. They are about six feet long and weigh about 180 pounds. They reach sexual maturity somewhere between 20 and 25 years, and they live to be somewhere between eighty and a hundred years old. They've lived for millions of years, forgotten and abandoned in the dark while the world changed. Now roughly one Coelacanth's lifetime has passed since they've been discovered. Are they perfect for not needed to have changed or are they doomed to die off slowly for all the change that has happened around them?
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