The scientific tourist #10 — what a smile!
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.
PhilDS wrote,
Hi Sam,
the foto has been deleted.
Link | March 4th, 2008 at 14:15 EST
Sam Wise wrote,
Thanks for the alert — I’d updated the image with a better version, and *thought* I’d updated the links in the post. Apparently not.
Should be all better now…
Link | March 4th, 2008 at 14:49 EST