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Coelacanth — printable fact sheet
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Coelacanth
Latimeria chalumnae
The coelacanth was known only from fossils and assumed to have died out with the dinosaurs, roughly sixty-six million years ago — until 1938, when one turned up in a South African trawler's catch and a museum curator recognised what she was looking at. It is more closely related…
Did you know?
- Coelacanths give birth to live young after an unusually long gestation period of up to 3 years.
- It was believed extinct for 66 million years until a live one was caught in 1938. It is more closely related to humans than to a tuna. It has a hinge across its skull — an intracranial joint no other living vertebrate has — that lets it swing its snout up to widen its bite. It has no backbone, just a fluid-filled notochord, and detects prey by electric field.
What I learned
Draw the coelacanth
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