The living fossil coelacanth
A trawler nets a fish known only from fossils
In December 1938 a trawler captain showed museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer in East London a strange blue fish. Ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith recognised a coelacanth, a fish known to science only from fossils and thought long extinct. The species was named Latimeria after her.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Did you know
The coelacanth is more closely related to you than to a tuna. Coelacanths are closer to lungfish and four-limbed animals, humans included, than to ordinary ray-finned fish such as tuna or perch. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 20 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 1 year later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 9 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 10 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 11 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 10 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 5 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 2 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 3 years later
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 15 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 9 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 2 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 3 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 4 years later
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 7 years later
Middle East
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 23 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 22 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 6 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 10 years later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 10 years later
Asia
- 1931 China floods — 7 years earlier
- 1934–1935 Long March — 4 years earlier
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 7 years later
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 7 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 15 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 24 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 9 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 8 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 7 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 9 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 2 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 3 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 4 years later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 16 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 21 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 82)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 69)
- Winston Churchill (aged 64)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 60)
- Albert Einstein (aged 59)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 57)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 57)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 49)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 49)
- Mao Zedong (aged 45)