Category: fish

Few creatures stir the imagination like the coelacanth. Scientists thought it had been extinct for millions of years, and then in the 1930s, a specimen seemed to have swum from the Devonian right into a fisherman’s net.

Now scientists have finally sequenced the genome of this elusive, primitive looking creature to find out how slowly it’s really evolved, and to discern its relationship to those fish that dragged themselves onto land and became our ancestors. The news was announced in a paper in Nature.

At the LA Times, Eryn Brown covered the advance in this story, which told us that it was difficult to get DNA from this highly endangered fish but not how they finally did it. How does one go about getting a DNA sample from a five-...