News from the Natural World: Are Coelacanths extinct? We speak to one called Carla who cannot believe the depth of human stupidity and confusion.
“Big head, big brain, so dim!”
Carla the Coelacanth has issued this statement from her sea cave in Comoros after another of her kind disappeared, presumed to have been caught in a fishing net:- “I read that humans don’t like to eat us because we taste foul and that you do want to protect us as we totter on the brink extinction, so why do you kill us? Such ignorance! You know nothing about us. “
Carla was really hitting her stroke now – “You say you discovered our fossils in the 1830s. One scientist decided Coelacanths appeared 400M yrs ago (early Devonian), another opted for 260M yrs ago (Permian), but they did agree that we died out in the Mass Extinction of 66M yrs ago (late Cretaceous) that obliterated the dinosaurs, when an asteroid collided with our planet. But we have been living mainly off the eastern coast of Africa in the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean for all this time, undetected, until you found one of us in 1938 off South Africa. After all, we are very tiny, hard to see, as we only grow up to 2m long and can weigh 90kgs (198lbs)! I almost qualify as a heavyweight boxer!“