The coelacanth is more closely related to you than to a tuna.

1938

Coelacanths are closer to lungfish and four-limbed animals, humans included, than to ordinary ray-finned fish such as tuna or perch.

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The event

• The living fossil coelacanth1938 · East London, South Africa. 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.

20th century

More amazing facts

• 1936 The thylacine was granted protection on 10 July 1936; the last known animal died at Hobart Zoo on 7 September — just 59 days later.
• 1937 Chkalov flew over the North Pole to Vancouver — not the Canadian city, but its namesake in Washington State, USA. The nonstop flight from Moscow in June 1937 took 63 hours.
• 1938 Three months after the Munich Agreement, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin discovered the fission of uranium.
• 1938 Saudi Arabia struck oil only on its seventh try. Six wells at Dammam yielded nothing commercial; on 3 March 1938 the seventh gushed from about 1,440 m down, and it kept pumping until 1982.
• 1938 Teflon was found by sawing open an 'empty' cylinder.
• 1938 · 1943 The ballpoint pen was invented by a Hungarian and launched in Argentina.

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