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" LIVING FOSSIL" MYSTIFIES EVOLUTIONISTS. Scientists
at one time thought the coelacanth had d ied out millions of
years ago. Bvt recently severa! live coelacanths have been
discovered, to the chagrin of evolutionists. Coela canths look
exactly like their fossil ancestors.
J.mbossodor Col/oge
Pholo
Evolution demands that life has grown progressively more
complex as millions of years have passed. Yet
many
LIVING
types of animals and plants are essentially the same as their
fossil representatives believed to be millions of years old.
These "living fossi/s" pose a serious question to the very basis
of the theory of evolution .
by
Robert E. Gentet
T
HE
time: late 1938.
The place: East London, a
port on the southeast coast
of
South Africa.
Miss M. Courtenay-Latimer, a curator
of the local museum, is surprised to
ñnd' a strange-fool<1'ng Jfsñ among t:Jie
catch of a fisherman.
The unusual fish is five feet long,
weighs
127
pounds, and is steel-blue in
color, with dark blue eyes.
Exper ts Amazed
Since she was unable to identify the
fish, Miss Latimer sent a sketch of it to
Professor
J.
L.
B. Smlth at tne Rhodes
University College at Grahamstown,
South Afr ica. A .fish expert, Professor
Smith was dumbfounded! "M
y
surprise
would have been little greater if I had
seen a dinosaur walking clown the
street," he exclaimed.
Why was Professor Smith so aston–
ished? The fish was very similar
to one which was thought to have
become extinct about 70 million years
ago!
Dr.
Smith named the fish after
Miss Latimer -
Latimeria chalmnnae
Smith.
Professor Jacques Millot of the Paris
Museum of Natural History paid Pro–
fessor Srnith a high tribute by writing
in the Loodon
Times:
"The capture of
the coelacanth, with which the oame of
Profcssor
J.
L.
B. Smi'th
wiTf aiways
be !inked, has been rightly described
as 'the most amazing event of the cen-