i have a lot of feelings and thoughts about coelacanths today
like… they’re blue
you have this mysterious fish that no one really cared about, because everyone assumed they’d gone extinct with the dinosaurs. an interesting footnote, but one of many, many fossil species.
and later the coelacanth gets some fame as a so-called “missing link” species, a theory which is now outdated (and not accurate for coelacanths) but was really influential at the time. because they have some weird biological quirks – bones in fins! – people were like “oh, they must be a missing link.” so the coelacanth was launched into some fame with the theory of evolution. it got brought up a lot. drawn in old textbooks as proof.
and then a fisherman finds a weird fish off the coast of south africa and calls a local fish expert who had let it be known she was interested in weird finds, and he brings her the (unfortunately badly rotted) corpse and she’s like “well, this is sure weird,” and sends off the bones to other experts, who start to quietly freak out, and rush to south africa, and rewards are offered for another one, any other one, and a few years later one is caught and frozen before rotting.
and it’s this incredible discovery, this extinct creature come to life (the prehistoric coelacanth lived in swamps and marshes in south america; these now are deep ocean fish in and around the indian ocean, but it’s still recognizably the same species)!
but it’s also blue.
not like, muddy blue, or tumblr-default-background blue.
proper shimmering sapphire blue and white. almost turquoise in some lights. this like… muddy, fossil creature. always drawn in dinosaur browns and grays. and it’s alive and it’s blue. just imagine being the scientist who opened that crate to this creature for the first time. you’re already excited, you’ve known about this fish for decades, you thought it was a story, you know it’s in this box. you expect to see the weird fins and the strange tail. you know it’s large and odd looking. and you open it up and it’s this beautiful, shining blue, you know?
[img described: a coelacanth. it is blue.]
There are two distinct species of Coelacanth. The West Indian Coelacanth is blue, and the Indonesian Coelacanth is brown.
The species that was first discovered was the West Indian Ocean coelacanth thus the story still checks out for one species.
For reference:
The West Indian Ocean coelacanth
Model in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
The Indonesian coelacanth
