Sorting Out Science

This week’s “sciencey” tourist picture is of a Coelacanth model in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

Coelacanths are odd critters — they were thought to be extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period until one was accidentally caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938. Since then, a number of specimens have been caught in various locations off the eastern coast of southern Africa, and in the waters of Indonesia.

Coelacanths are related to tetrapods, and are likely closely related to the first animals to venture onto land.

As usual, click on the above picture to get to the Flickr version of this image — it’ll give you lots of options for resizing and otherwise manipulating the source photo.