coelacanth
pronunciation
How to pronounce coelacanth in British English:
UK [ˈsi:ləkænθ]
How to pronounce coelacanth in American English:
US ['siləkænθ]
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- Noun:
- fish thought to have been extinct since the Cretaceous Period but found in 1938 off the coast of Africa
Word Origin
- coelacanth (n.)
- 1857, from Modern Latin Coelacanthus (genus name, 1839, Agassiz), from Greek koilos "hollow" (from PIE root *kel- (2); see cell) + akantha "spine" (see acrid). So called from the hollow fin rays supporting the tail. Known only as a fossil, the most recent one from 70 million years ago, until discovered living in the sea off the east coast of South Africa Dec. 22, 1938. The specimen was described by Marjorie Courtney-Latimer, who wrote about it to S.African ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith. I stared and stared, at first in puzzlement. I did not know any fish of our own, or indeed of any seas like that; it looked more like a lizard. And then a bomb seemed to burst in my brain, and beyond that sketch and the paper of the letter, I was looking at a series of fishy creatures that flashed up as on a screen, fishes no longer here, fishes that had lived in dim past ages gone, and of which only fragmentary remains in rock are known. [J.L.B. Smith, "Old Fourlegs: The Story of the Coelacanth," 1956]
Example
- 1. The coelacanth inhabits the deep sea .
- 2. To specialists , the coelacanth species latimer stumbled across is called latimeria chalumnae .
- 3. Hagi is the coelacanth of japan , the ancient survivor that people assume to be extinct .
- 4. The modern coelacanth species belong to an ancient lineage of fish that goes back 390 million years , but they are not unchanged hold-outs , either .
- 5. Any of various mostly extinct bony fishes of the subclass crossopterygii , of which the coelacanth is a living representative .