rising@zoo.toronto.edu (Jim Rising) (06/04/91)
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 UUCP: uunet!attcan!utzoo!rising BITNET: rising@zoo.utoronto.ca