Newsgroups: sci.bio
Path: utzoo!rising
From: rising@zoo.toronto.edu (Jim Rising)
Subject: Coelacanth
Message-ID: <1991Jun4.142110.19441@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1991 14:21:10 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

This is not something that I know much about, but feel
compelled to post in any event.  The coelacanths were a group
of fishes that arose in the Devonian at about the same time that
the ancestors to the other modern groups of jawed fishes arose.
Coelacanths were thought to have gone extinct at the end of the
Cretaceous, ca. 62 million years ago, until a modern species,
Latimeria chalumnae, was found off the east coast of Africa.
Latimeria is a modern species with no fossil record, and is 
unlike any coelacanth that is known to have lived 400 million
years ago or 62 million years ago.   It is no more "primitive"
(whatever that means) than Homo sapiens is.  H. sapiens is 
unlike any mammal that lived in the Triassic (when mammals
first appear in the fossil record) or Cretaceous, just as L.
chalumnae is unlike any fish that lived during those times.
-- 
Name:     Jim Rising
Mail:     Dept. Zoology, Univ. Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada    M5S 1A1
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