New England Whale Watch Book

This fascinating history of the Coelacanth is beautifully written, lighthearted and fascinating. A brilliant yarn in every sense of the word, it tells the story of how the Coelacanth went from being a fossil considered to be extinct for 50-70 million years to being one of the few distinguished 'living fossils' of our time.

The story takes us back to East London, South Africa 1938 when a young museum curator, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer went down to examine a trawler catch and found a fish that was so beautiful that the image stayed with her for the rest of her life, but also it was a fish mysteriously unidentifiable and taxonomically strange.

Throughout the book the people who see the Coelocanth, especially unexpectedly, all seem to have a moment when they realise they are seeing something unique, perhaps because it is so unlike modern fish.

I learnt about the Coelocanth of course, I am sure that anyone who studied Zoology or Marine Biology did. Even for me the very small segment of course spent on it stirred the imagination and so this book about how it was discovered, exposed to modern science and slowly revealed and the layers of of mystery were slowly peeled back was just amazing. Loved this book.