Fish tale has real legs

July 30, 2007 12:00am

"IT is a fish which has legs. It should be given back to the water. It will bring misfortune."

The fish is said to swim awkwardly.

So fisherman Justinus Lahama was told when he tried to sell his prize catch: a fish scientists dub a "living fossil".

Instead, it brought an international team of scientists rushing to Indonesia to investigate.

The rare coelacanth is among the world's oldest fish, usually living 200-1000m down, growing up to two metres, and weighing as much as 91kg.

On May 19, Lahama and son Delvy caught it from a canoe in Malalayang river, on northern Sulawesi.

He thought he was dreaming when he saw the creature on his line.

"It was an enormous fish. It had phosphorescent green eyes and legs. If I had pulled it up during the night, I would have been afraid and I would have thrown it back in."

The fish survived in a pool for 17 hours and, invaluably, was filmed. The species had only previously been recorded in caves at great depths.

Only the second captured in Asia, it was 1.3m long and weighed 50kg.

Coelacanths had been thought to have died out around the time dinosaurs became extinct, until one was found off eastern Africa in 1938.

Fossil records dating back more than 360 million years suggest they have changed little.

- AFP

Source: Herald Sun