African Ancestor

Ichthyologist James Leonard Brierley Smith, of Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, made a formal call last week on stony old Prime Minister Malan. He walked across the lawn of Malan's Cape Town residence and reverently laid a treasure at the Prime Minister's feet. It was a bony, clumsy-looking fish about 5 ft. long, smelling of Formalin and incipient putrefaction. The Prime Minister looked at it dubiously. He is a former dominie of the Dutch Reformed Church, which does not believe in evolution.

"You mean to tell me," he asked, "that we looked like that 300 million years ago? It's very ugly."

"I've seen uglier human beings," said Dr. Smith, who had already named the fish Malania artjouanae, in honor of the Prime Minister. To Dr. Smith, the fish was worth all the diamonds in South Africa. It was the end of a 15-year search.

Blue-Eyed Monster. Dr. Smith's long quest began in 1938, when a South African trawler caught an odd, steel-blue fish off East London. The fish had large blue eyes, teeth like a cat, and four clumsy fins that looked a bit like legs. It lived for three hours, oozed oil from under its scales, bit the captain, and was taken ashore, where a local naturalist recognized it as a coelacanth (pronounced see-la-kanth), a fish which zoologists had believed extinct for at least 50 million years. Coelacanths appeared 300 million years ago and were much like the primitive, sea-keeping ancestors of all land vertebrates, including man.

Dr. Smith hurried to East London, but before he arrived, the fish had disintegrated. Its soft parts had turned to mush, leaving only its bones and armorlike scales. Then & there Dr. Smith swore an ichthyological oath: he would find another coelacanth. Somewhere in East African waters there must be more of them.

For 15 years he searched, visiting savage coasts and coral islands. He almost lost an arm to a loft. shark, was nipped by a poisonous fish. "I was stung, stabbed and bitten," he recalls, "by fishes, fishes, and still more fishes." But never a coelacanth rose to bite him with its catlike teeth.

Formalin for Posterity. About two weeks ago, Dr. Smith got a cablegram from Captain Eric Hunt, former British naval officer, amateur zoologist, and master of a small, coastal-trading vessel. A coelacanth had been caught, said Hunt, in the Mozambique Channel near Madagascar. Dr. Smith had better come quick, before it turned to mush like the other one.

Smith grabbed a phone and called Prime Minister Malan. It was midnight, and the Prime Minister was in bed and asleep. He stumbled to the telephone in his pajamas and heard the excited ichthyologist pleading for an airplane to take him to the fish. Malan acted quickly. Next morning a Dakota (DC-3) of the South African air force took off for the Mozambique Channel, with Dr. Smith fretting in the cabin. It made a landing on the small French island of Dzaoudzi, more than 1,500 miles away. There Dr. Smith found his fish, rank but undecayed, on Trader Hunt's little ship. He knelt on the deck and wept.

The fish had been caught by a native near Anjouan, another small island. Trader Hunt heard of it and rushed to the rescue. He had no ice to preserve the prize, but he borrowed a syringe from a medical officer and injected it with Formalin.

Now the coelacanth lies in state in Dr. Smith's laboratory, amid a buzz of excitement. The dissection, study, description and discussion of the fish named after Prime Minister Malan will keep zoologists happily engaged for many years. It may not prove to be in the direct line of land-vertebrate evolution, but it is certainly close.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.