Q. Is the coelacanth the only living fossil?
A. The term “living fossil” was originally used by Darwin to describe ancient species, like the ginkgo tree or horseshoe crab, that appeared little changed over millions of years.
But in the popular imagination, the phrase has come to be mean a species or groups of species known only from the fossil record until living examples were discovered, often in remote places.
The most famous is the coelacanth, a bony fish found in 1938 in the catch of a fisherman in South Africa. It was spotted by a museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and named Latimeria chalumnae in her honor.
Examples of a second species were found in Indonesia waters in the 1990’s. Coelacanths had been thought to have become extinct about 65 million years ago.
Other animals and plants have been found long after their fossil records broke off, including the famous dawn redwood tree discovered in 1944 in a remote area of China some 5 million years after its “extinction.”
Scientists refer to such species as Lazarus species rather than living fossils. Less familiar examples include glypheoid lobsters, mymarommatid wasps, eomeropid scorpionflies and jurodid beetles.