Coelacanth, an ancient fish once thought to have become extinct at the time of the dinosaurs is not fully extinct. An Indonesian fisherman Yustinus Lahama and his son caught the fish in the sea off North Sulawesi province.
Yustinus kept the fish in a quarantine pool for about 17 hours where it died.
Grevo Gerung, a professor at the fisheries faculty at the Sam Ratulangi University said:
If kept outside their habitat (60 meters or 200 ft below the sea), the fish can only live for two hours. But this fish lived for about 17 hours.
The fish was 131 centimeters long and weighed around 51 kg. It is after around nine years that coelacanth is caught. In 1998, fishermen a caught another coelacanth in a deep-water shark net off northern Sulawesi.
Coelacanths are the only living animals that have fully functional intercranial joint, which is a division separating the ear and brain from the nasal organs and eye. These are said to have dated back more than 360 million years. Before 1938, it was believed that these have become extinct. But, the very incident has proved that they are not fully extinct.
Source: Yahoo!