Coelacanth

Coelacanths Temporal range: Devonian – Recent
Latimeria chalumnae, Natural History Museum, Vienna (170 cm; 60 kg). Caught 18 October 1974, off Grand Comoro, Comoro Islands. 11°48′40.7″S 43°16′3.3″E / 11.811306°S 43.267583°E / -11.811306; 43.267583.
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Sarcopterygii
Subclass:	Coelacanthimorpha
Order:	Coelacanthiformes Berg, 1937

A coelacanth is a type of fish in the Sarcopterygii, the lobe-finned fishes.^[1] They are a sister group to those fish which evolved into tetrapods.^[2] Their fossil record goes back 400 million years, before any land vertebrates had evolved.^[3]

There are at least two species of coelacanths living in the Indian Ocean. Scientists thought they had been extinct for 80 million years until one was caught off the east African coast in 1938.^[4] However, fisherman in the Comoros islands had been catching it for a very long time and called it gombesa.^[4]

1. ↑ Coelacanth is pronounced 'seela-canth'
2. ↑ The sister group which included the ancestors of the tetrapods is called the Rhipidistia.
3. ↑ Johanson, Zerina, John A. Long, John A. Talent, Philippe Janvier, and James W. Warren. 2006. Oldest Coelacanth, from the early Devonian of Australia. Biology Letters 2.3 443–46
4. ↑ ^{4.0 4.1} Walker, Iain (2019). Islands in a Cosmopolitan Sea: A History of the Comoros. Oxford University Press. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-19-007130-1.