Page 195 - Atlas of Creation Volume 4

Harun Yahya

Coelacanth

Period: Triassic

Age: 210 million years
Region: Madagascar

The discovery of a living coelacanth, a 210-million-year-old fossil specimen of which is shown in
the picture, came as a severe blow to evolutionists. Evolutionist biologists seeking evidence for
their theory of “a passage from water to land” had made highly irrational claims on the basis of
the coelacanth. They suggested that the fish had a supposedly primitive (not fully functional)
lung. This was described in a great many scientific references, and illustrations representing the

coelacanth moving from water onto dry land were often published. Until 1938, many evolutio-
nary biologists hypothesized that this life form used the two double fins on its body to walk
along the sea bed and was a transitional form between marine and terrestrial animals. As evi-
dence for these claims, evolutionists pointed to the bony structures in coelacanth fossil fins.

However, an event in the Indian Ocean on December 22nd 1938, totally demolished that idea. A
living member of the Latimeria species, one of the coelacanth family, which had been depicted
as a transitional form that had become extinct 70 million years earlier, was caught in the midd-
le of the ocean! The discovery of a “living, breathing” coelacanth came as a huge shock to evo-
lutionists. In addition, examination of the animal, thought to have disappeared 70 million years
in the past, showed that coelacanths had never changed over 400 million years. More than 200

coelacanths, a species which evolutionists had declared long extinct, were caught in the years
that followed in other regions, especially in 1939 in the mouth of the Chalumna River and off the
coast of Madagascar, and in the seas off the Comorra Islands in 1952 and 1953.

Adnan Oktar 193