FOR A MOMENT THERE I THOUGHT WE’D LOST YOU

APRIL 20th, 2010

According to British Law you have to wait 7 years before you can declare a missing person officially dead. It is not surprising then that when no trace of the coelacanth was found for 65 million years, scientists believed it was safe to declare it extinct. It appeared that they had been overly hasty however when in 1938 a South African museum curator stumbled across a coelacanth at a fisherman’s port. Whilst almost all species of the coelacanth went extinct 65 million years ago, somehow a few managed to survive.

Some interesting features include a brain cavity that is 99% fat, a heart that is a straight tube, and kidneys that are combined into a single organ. It is possible that these traits were common to many extinct species from the period. For more information about this fascinating throwback head over to environmentalgraffitti.com.

Source: EnvironmentalGraffitti

This entry was posted on Tuesday, APRIL 20th, 2010 at 10:58 am and is filed under ENVIRONMENT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.