Science View

The Coelacanth! The Living Fossil That Casts Light on Evolution's Mysteries (1x7)

: 19, 2012

The coelacanth appeared on Earth before the dinosaurs and it is still around today virtually unchanged! For a long time the life cycle of this "living fossil fish" was unknown, but a team from Japan's Aquamarine Fukushima, based in the same Fukushima Prefecture where the 2011 nuclear accident took place, is using an unmanned submersible with high-definition video cameras on board to film the coelacanth in its native waters in Indonesia. The team was the first to capture images of coelacanth fry. Meanwhile, a research group representing Japan and Tanzania has succeeded in sequencing the coelacanth's entire genome. Coelacanth-related discoveries are flying in! Professor Norihiro Okada of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who worked on the coelacanth genome project, joins us in the studio to explore the mysteries of evolution.