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Coelacanth

Latimeria chalumnae · impossible

In December 1938 a museum curator in South Africa, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, was called to look at an unusual catch on a trawler at East London. The fish was steel blue with peculiar fleshy, limb-like fins. She could not identify it, preserved what she could, and sent a sketch to the ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith, who recognised what it was and reportedly could not at first believe it. Coelacanths were known from fossils and were supposed to have died out with the dinosaurs.

The living fish had gone unremarked by science while being caught intermittently by fishermen for generations. A second population was later found in Indonesia, distinct enough to be a separate species.

Coelacanths are large, slow, deep-water fish that shelter in volcanic caves by day and drift out at night to feed. They have a hinged joint in the skull that lets the front of the head tilt upward, a notochord filled with oil rather than a backbone of vertebrae, and paired fins that move in the alternating pattern of a walking tetrapod — which is why they matter so much to anyone studying how vertebrates came onto land, even though they are not our direct ancestors.

Where it lives

Worml lists the coelacanth as native to 6 countries — Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania. Its habitat is deep volcanic slopes and submarine caves.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Coelacanth is rated impossible. To solve the round you need to find any 3 of its 6 listed countries. How scoring works →

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