What it eats: A variety of fish and cephalopods, including squid and cuttlefish. Head of a preserved Coelacanth specimen. Why it's awesome: Scientists thought all coelacanths went extinct over 65 ...

Imagine if you turned on the news tonight and saw a report that a hunter had accidentally shot down a pterodactyl. That's almost what happened on the Eastern Cape of South Africa in December of 1938, ...

Paleontologists recently discovered a new extinct coelacanth species that highlights the role that Earth’s plate tectonics plays in evolution. Also called Latimeria, coelacanths are a deep-sea fish ...

An underwater species that was once believed to have gone extinct some 70 million years ago was recently spotted in what became a rare photoshoot for the fish. Researchers found the coelacanth, known ...

A species of coelacanth, a fish that dates back to before the dinosaurs, has been photographed in Indonesia for the first time. Chappuis overcame the challenge of deep mixed-gas diving, which has led ...

The modern coelacanth is a famous "living fossil," long thought to have died out, but first fished out of deep waters in the Indian Ocean in 1938. Since then, dozens of examples have been found, but ...

A remarkable find in 1938 stunned scientists. A fish, believed extinct for millions of years, was caught off South Africa.

Chappuis et al., Scientific Reports, 2025 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) There are lots of animals in the ocean, and sadly, many of them are quite rare and hard to catch a glimpse of. One type of fish, however, is ...

Some of the greatest scientific findings indeed tend to occur when people least expect them to. For example, on one winter ...