The Coelacanth isn’t a cryptid, or a ghost, much less some sort of weird underwater UFO. So what is this fishy character doing on a site about the paranormal?
The coelacanth ( see-luh-canf ) is an ancient fish that had been thought by scientists to have been extinct for 65 million years. Then in 1938 a South African fisherman and his crew netted one! Since then, many of these living fossils have been caught off in waters around Africa, from Kenya to Tanzania, as well as in Indonesia.
The reason this 6 foot, 200 lb goldfish is being featured here is that he is good evidence that something can be thought by all the experts to be long gone, only to have been around all along. This raises the possibility that some cryptids may be just another re-discovery waiting to happen. If such a large and bizarre fish can go un-noticed for millions of years, is it so impossible that somewhere in the darkest, most well-hidden corners of North America there lurk family groups of some undiscovered or supposedly extinct hominids that were called Sasquatches by Native Americans and Bigfoot by the white invaders? And perhaps Nessie really is just a tourist trap set by Scottish Tourist Board, or maybe she’s another forgotten species. Even something as out there as the Mongolian Death Worm may be a prehistoric survival distorted by myth. Who knows? Today’s cryptid may be tomorrow’s scientific find. It’s happened before, there’s no reason it can’t happen again.
