Search for crossword answers and clues
Fish thought to have been extinct since the Cretaceous Period but found in 1938 off the coast of Africa
Answer for the clue "Fish thought to have been extinct since the Cretaceous Period but found in 1938 off the coast of Africa ", 10 letters:
coelacanth
Word definitions for coelacanth in dictionaries
WordNet
Word definitions in WordNet
n. fish thought to have been extinct since the Cretaceous Period but found in 1938 off the coast of Africa [syn: Latimeria chalumnae ]
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Word definitions in Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
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 ...
Wikipedia
Word definitions in Wikipedia
The coelacanths constitute a now rare order of fish that includes two extant species in the genus Latimeria : the West Indian Ocean coelacanth primarily found near the Comoro Islands off the east coast of Africa ( Latimeria chalumnae ) and the Indonesian ...
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Word definitions in The Collaborative International Dictionary
Coelacanth \C[oe]l"a*canth\ (? or ?), a. [Gr. koi^los hollow + ? spine.] (Zo["o]l.) Having hollow spines, as some ganoid fishes.
Wiktionary
Word definitions in Wiktionary
n. 1 Either of two species of deep-water fish, (taxlink Latimeria chalumnae species noshow=1) of the Indian Ocean and (taxlink Latimeria menadoensis species noshow=1) of Indonesia. 2 Any lobe-finned fish in the order Coelacanthiformes, thought until 1938 ...
Usage examples of coelacanth.
Coedric the Coelacanth and the legendary Gypsy Queen, but as fate would have it the two Muskellunge clansmen sulking at the far end of the tavern jumped up at that moment.
The giant central lake was warmer than bath water, saltier than the Atlantic, and filled with foul-tasting lungfish and coelacanths, plus crocodiles bigger than any bus.
The little coelacanth symbol appeared over his name, meaning Grandmaster.
The coelacanth was a five-foot-long fish thought to have died out sixty-five million years ago, until a specimen was pulled from the ocean in 1938.
Some were a few million years old- in the case of the coelacanth, sixty-five million years old.
Coedric was disgruntled as well, having been forced to put aside his coelacanth helm, and don the lavender livery of the imaginary nation of Sheba.
You always knew when you were playing one of those because a little Coelacanth symbol would come up on the screen.
Like cockroaches and the coelacanth, bats have been around for more than fifty million years in more or less the form that you see them now.
There are still old cases of bullet-and-robber-proof glass, with fossils in them, little ancient dragons of the deeps, only three feet long, and coelacanths with needle teeth.
Fish, sharks, coelacanths, a few squirrel-sized mammals, and lungfish were also common in freshwater terrestrial habitats, especially in the Late Jurassic when the effects of aridity were ameliorated.
The coelacanths were a large group of 'fish' (actually, although they are called fish they are more closely related to us than they are to trout and herrings) that flourished more than 250 million years ago and apparently died out at about the same time as the dinosaurs.
It is conceivable that coelacanths stopped evolving because they stopped mutating — perhaps because they were protected from cosmic rays at the bottom of the sea!
At any rate, Don took his degree in biology, and his doctorate thesis was on the survival of archetypal, genes in living fossils like coelacanths and king crabs and ginkgos.
It would be many months before the team was able to definitively identify the fish at Happy Fish as a coelacanth, a lobe-finned fish that first emerged in the Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era, some 400 million years ago, and became extinct not long after the rocks of Bahariya were laid down.