Crossword clues for coelacanth
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.
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 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.\n\nI 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]
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 to have been extinct for 70 million years.
WordNet
n. fish thought to have been extinct since the Cretaceous Period but found in 1938 off the coast of Africa [syn: Latimeria chalumnae]
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 coelacanth (Latimeria menadoensis). They follow the oldest known living lineage of Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish and tetrapods), which means they are more closely related to lungfish, reptiles and mammals than to the common ray-finned fishes. They are found along the coastlines of the Indian Ocean and Indonesia. Since there are only two species of coelacanth and both are threatened, it is the most endangered order of animals in the world. The West Indian Ocean coelacanth is a critically endangered species.
Coelacanths belong to the subclass Actinistia, a group of lobed-finned fish related to lungfish and certain extinct Devonian fish such as osteolepiforms, porolepiforms, rhizodonts, and Panderichthys. Coelacanths were thought to have become extinct in the Late Cretaceous, around 66 million years ago, but were rediscovered in 1938 off the coast of South Africa.
The coelacanth was long considered a “ living fossil” because it was believed to be the sole remaining member of a taxon otherwise known only from fossils, with no close relations alive, and to have evolved into roughly its current form approximately 400 million years ago. Several recent studies have shown that coelacanth body shapes are much more diverse than was previously thought, however.
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.