Scientists thought this fish had been extinct for 66 million years, until it reappeared

For decades, the coelacanth existed in scientific literature as a creature of the distant past. Fossils showed that members of this ancient fish lineage had lived alongside dinosaurs and vanished from the fossil record around 66 million years ago. The assumption seemed straightforward: they were gone.Then, in December 1938, a fishing trawler operating off the coast of South Africa hauled up an animal that should not have existed. Resting among the catch was a large blue fish unlike anything local museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had seen before. What followed became one of the most remarkable episodes in modern natural history.