A fish thought extinct for 65 million years turned up in a fisherman's net in 1938

Coelacanths were known only from fossils and presumed to have died out alongside the dinosaurs, until museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer spotted one among a trawler's catch off South Africa in 1938. Live coelacanths have since turned up off the Comoro Islands and Indonesia, remarkably close in form to ancestors that swam some 400 million years ago.

— Samantha Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth — Fourth Estate, 1999
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