Wednesday April 22, 2026
Phys —
A new species of coelacanth has been identified from a 150-year-old fossil housed at London’s Natural History Museum. Former University of Portsmouth paleontology student Jack L. Norton located the coelacanth, which provides a crucial missing piece in the evolutionary history of one of the world’s most iconic fish lineages.
A missing chapter in coelacanth history
The discovery is a species of the so-called “living fossil” coelacanths, which still swim in the seas today, having survived the extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. It comes from the Lower Cretaceous Gault Formation of southern England, and its identification fills a long-standing 50-million-year gap in the fossil record of Latimeriidae, the family that includes the modern coelacanth.