In 1938, South African museum curator and naturalist Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer came across a strange blue fin poking out of a pile of fish. With its fleshy, lobed fins and its tough armored scales, the coelacanth did not look like any other fish that exists today. The coelacanth belongs to a lineage that has remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years—earning it the description of a “living fossil.”
Charles Darwin coined the term in On the Origin of Species in 1859. And it fits the coelacanth, pronounced see-luh-kanth, a now-rare bottom-dwelling fish that, prior to Courtenay-Latimer’s discovery, was thought to have gone extinct over 65 million years ago.
From Sweet Fern Productions, a collaboration between documentary filmmaker Sharon Shattuck and science journalist Flora Lichtman, this is Animated Life: The Living Fossil Fish (2015) for HHMI: Biointeractive. The paper puppetry short shares a pivotal moment in science, made possible by Courtenay-Latimer’s vigilance in documenting this remarkable fish.
Read more about the coelacanth at Smithsonian Ocean and Wired.
This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity. TKSST features smarter, more meaningful content than what's usually served up by YouTube's algorithms, and amplifies the creators who make that content.
Curated, kid-friendly, independently-published. Support this mission by becoming a sustaining member today.