Here’s another whopper of a fish story that is just hot off the presses! Last week we chatted about the big one that got away. This week, it’s a story about the big one that that didn’t get away, and what a fish it was! Two months ago, a fisherman in Indonesia (an island nation off the coast of China) caught a very unusual fish. It belonged to a species (a specific group of organisms that can make offspring or babies) of ancient fish that has been living on this planet for over 400 000 000 years. This means it lived millions of years before the dinosaurs, but unlike the giant reptiles, these fish are still around today! Scientists are examining the catch now for clues about life in the ancient seas. The fish, known as a coelacanth, is very rare. Only a few have ever been caught. Scientists thought they died out over 70 million years ago. Did they ever get a surprise when the first one was caught off the African coast in 1938! As for the recent catch, the fish was 1.3 meters long and weight over 100 lbs! Coelacanths are very strange looking when compared to other fish. They are sort of a window to the past, showing us how fish looked millions of years ago!

So, what do they look like? This is a giant of a fish with some rather unusual fins—in fact they are really more like legs than fins! These ‘legs,’ as well as a coelacanth’s green eyes, glow in the dark! The fisherman that caught it actually said it was so scary looking he would have thrown it back if he caught it at night! Usually coelacanths stay away from the surface during the daytime because the have very sensitive eyes. But not this one, much to his bad luck! For more info on this old-timer of the deep and some cool videos, check out http://www.dinofish.com.