The world is filled with weird and wonderful creatures, and a good proportion of them are found deep down in the ocean. We actually know more about the surface of the moon than we know about the deepest parts of the ocean here on planet earth.

Some marine species are of course very carefully studied and can even be found in marine aquariums in living rooms and public aquatic parks around the world. These species are however mostly the ones that are found close to the surface in the wild, e.g. the colourful reef fishes that never ventures further down than 30-40 meters.

For a creature that lives deep down at depths never explored by man, the risk (or chance) of ending up in an aquarium is slim. One of the most interesting beasts to surface from the depths during the 20th century is the Coelacanth.

Coelacanths are bony fishes from the order Coelacanthiformes. What makes them so interesting is the fact that before a living specimen was found during the 1930s, they were believed to have become completely extinct together with the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period.

In 1936, a museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer befriended a Captain Goosen who worked on a trawler off the African coast. Goosen began saving interesting fish specimens for Courtenay-Latimer, and eventually he brought her a primitive looking fish caught about 70 meters (77 yards) from the mouth of the Chalumna River in the Indian Ocean. This strange looking fish turned out to be a true, living Coelacanth.

The finding proved that some Coelacanths had actually survived the through the Cretaceous period and continued to reproduce deep down in the ocean. Who knows what else we might find down there as we continue to explore the mesmerizing depths of the world’s oceans.