Ep. 1 The Coelacanth
Episode Transcription (in the works)
Hello museum friends, my name is Antonio and this is What I Learned at the Museum Today—a podcast dedicated to learning from and advocating for museums. Let’s get started.
(Warped synth sound plays)
Alright so for my first episode I decided I want to talk about the coelacanth. The coelacanth, I first came across it when I was visiting the Natural Museum of Los Angeles County. I went to go look at the megamouth shark tank that they have there, a preserved one, and I noticed they had a fish towards the end of it, um that was kind of sharing a tank with it.
Of course these are dead, they’re preserved. And I was wondering what was so special about the fish. I was reading the little informational tidbit that they have and it didn’t say a whole lot but one of the things it said, which was pretty amazing, it was the thing that first peaked my interest of it, is that the fish, which is in the tank—you know, fleshy, tagged, you can see it’s eyes, you can see it’s fins, you know, interesting looking fins—it wasn’t a fossil, it was something that had to be alive within this century.
It said that it existed 400 million years ago. That’s interesting because dinosaurs existed 230 million years ago sos this fish predates the existence of dinosaurs and to have a full fleshed one preserved in this tank is really interesting.
So naturally I did some research, looked it up and immediately became obsesses with this fish. This fish, when I tell you, it is the most interesting thing that exists on this planet and it also kind of adds to the whole thing that we don’t really know whats down there in the ocean, we don’t know its vastness and the mysteries that it carries, and its really really cool to see and that alone, or all of that, I guess has made it the center of what I want to talk about today.
Like I said, this fish is on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and I guess i’ll go ahead and start beginning, start at the beginning, I should say.
Discovery
So like I mentioned, this fish existed 400 million years ago, and it was thought to be extinct just like everything else within that time and turns out in 1938 they actually discovered one. Well it was dead when they caught it.
The story goes, in the West Indian Ocean, Captain Hendrick Goosen was doing a regular catch on his trawler, his trawler boat, and when he pulled it apparently he was sued to contacting a local scientist, Majorie-Cortiney Latimer, and asked her, “do you want to come take a look at what we have?” I think he noticed that a particular fish was blue and I guess he kind of knew there was something strange about it, there wasn’t any other fish that they had caught or looked anything like it.
So he pulls it, saves it. Majorie comes in to look at it and she can’t find anything about the fish in her books so she ends up contacting another scientist, J. L. B. Smith, and he is credited with identifying the fish as the coelacanth and the characteristics of this fish is kind of what helped him because this fish has lobbed fins.
Now what that means is it’s fins, when you look at a regular fish the fin doesn’t necessarily have like bones and its kind of attached to the body in a small kind of, I don’t even know what it is, a ligament? As opposed to the coelacanth actually has little piece, or not a little piece but it has like a, it has a piece of its body that comes out in the same way that a limb does and at the end of it it has its fin.
And so inside that piece that comes out it has bone and, you know, has phalange looking bones, and that’s really interesting because fish don’t have that. The only thing that would have something similar to that would be like whales and sharks, you can see in their skeletons, in their reconstructions they have bones in there.
This fish goes beyond having just that bone that sticks out because it has almost like fingers. And so it’s really interesting to look at when you’re looking at it because like I said, fish today don’t have anything like that.
So, what they do is, they put the, they’re discovering and they’re realizing that this fish existed millions and millions of years ago, 400 million years ago, and it’s just an amazing, amazing discovery. Not just for the time, the 1930s, but even today. They haven’t found anything, at least nothing I would say as old as 400 million years ago. Like I said, that still exists today. That fish had to obviously have had to been alive at some point and then rose to the top and they caught it.
They did the typical museum stuff where they preserve it, they stuffed it, displayed it. Again it was dead, so it’s not like they killed it to do this but, it was already dead. They took care of, how to display it. They donated it to the East London Museum in South Africa and it’s actually currently on display there, the original fish they found in 1938. I think that’s amazing.
So flash forward to a couple forward to 1997, in the Indonesian Ocean, there was this couple. They are on their honeymoon, the Erdman’s. Mark Erdman, the husband, was a student at UC Berkley, he was studying reef ecology, and they were at the fish market and saw, he recognized, or thought he recognized this fish. I guess you can say he recognized this fish, it’s a weird looking fish.
He noticed it’s different from the other ones, and I didn’t look too closely but I think, oh yes yes, he did think it was the coelacanth that was discovered in the West Indian Ocean, but the coloration was different, the coloration was brown. As opposed to the West Indian one, it has a blue-ish tone to it. So he took a couple pictures of it and the fish was sold so that was that.
To Be Continued…
