Alright! Just for you dear @triflesandtea !!!!!!!!!<3
Okay so....Coelacanths were thought to be extinct because their fossils disappear from the geological record around 66 million years ago-- right around the same mass extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. Since nobody had ever seen a living one, scientists assumed they’d died out too.
Then in 1938, a museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer examined a strange fish caught off the coast of South Africa and realized it matched those “extinct” fossils almost perfectly. It was one of the biggest zoological discoveries of the 20th century.
What makes them especially important is that they’re lobe-finned fish-- their fins are fleshy and supported by bone structures somewhat similar to the early limbs of vertebrates that eventually evolved to walk on land. Watching them swim is apparently eerie because the fins move in an alternating pattern that almost resembles walking.
They’re also ancient in a very literal evolutionary sense. The lineage is over 400 million years old, meaning coelacanth ancestors existed long before dinosaurs did. Modern coelacanths live deep in the ocean, usually hundreds of meters down near volcanic caves, which is probably part of why they escaped notice for so long. They’re nocturnal predators that eat smaller fish and squid, and they can grow over 6 feet long.
And somehow they only get stranger the more you learn about them.
There are actually two known living species--one found near the Comoros Islands and East Africa, and another discovered in Indonesia in the 1990s. Until that second species was identified, people thought the first was the only surviving coelacanth left on Earth.
They live incredibly slowly. They can apparently live for around 60 years or more, don’t reach maturity until their 40s or 50s, and have very low reproduction rates, which makes them especially vulnerable as a species.
Their reproduction is wild too-- they don’t lay eggs externally like many fish. The females keep the eggs inside their bodies, and the babies hatch internally, so the young are born live after an extremely long gestation period that may last over 3 years, which is one of the longest known pregnancies of any fish!!
They also have a unique organ called the rostral organ in their snout that can detect electrical signals in the water, helping them locate prey in dark deep-sea environments where visibility is poor.
And despite looking like they should be enormous apex predators from some primordial nightmare, they’re actually pretty calm and slow-moving most of the time. They conserve energy by drifting in ocean currents and hanging out in underwater lava caves during the day before hunting at night.
One of my favorite details is that they still have a tiny oil-filled structure where ancient lungfish relatives would’ve had a functional lung. It’s basically an evolutionary leftover from ancestors that lived in much shallower waters.
And despite seeming so “primitive,” they’re not unchanged fossils frozen in time, they’ve still been evolving all along. They’re just part of an incredibly old lineage that survived while most related groups disappeared.
Also, scientists were so stunned by the 1938 discovery because finding a living coelacanth was sort of equivalent to discovering a living dinosaur wandering around unnoticed. Entire textbooks had to be reconsidered because this animal had gone from “extinct for tens of millions of years” to “apparently just extremely private.”
i’ll literally never have enough of that dylan b hollis dude cause like. hes a college student who just.,.blew up on tiktok. he has the soul of a man who has lived for 60 years in the body of a twink. he cooks and is surprised every single time. he goes CINAMIN everytime he uses cinnamon. he has the kitchen of a 60s house wife and cooks like hes going to kill someone
“It doesn’t tell ya how to eat it, so I don’t know if I need a knife and fork or if I need to tie my hair back” (about the very phallic looking candle salad)
“This pie is referred to as a chiffon. Now what does that mean? It means it was written by a white person.”
and even more unfortunately they can't make it now. It would get two seasons of ten episodes and they wouldn't get to Sky High until the end of the last episode of season one