Outquote: When Mark Erdmann found a dinosaur, he tried to do the right thing. Big mistake.We've all heard stories of people finding a rare antique at a rural tag sale somewhere. Maybe it's an old comic book, or a smoke-stained oil painting, or a beaten-up end table that a sharp-eyed city slicker picks up for a quarter and ends up auctioning off for millions at Sotheby's because the item in question is an Action Comics number one (first appearance of Superman), a minor Whistler, or a Hepplewhite hiding under a coat of paint. Let's call this urban legend "The Treasure in the Back Yard That Made Some Lucky Bastard Rich."
The corollary to this tale is the even more common "The Treasure in the Back Yard That I Stupidly Didn't Buy," which features the raconteur as the protagonist. In this variation, a person recognizes A Rare and Valuable Item but for one reason or another misses the opportunity. Maybe he's short a minimal sum of money, unable to fit the item in his car trunk, or is talked out of it by the dubious spouse who refuses to Spend One Penny on something so Obviously Worthless.
We can all identify with these urban legends. After all, most of us did not buy Microsoft stock back in the early '80s when we started hearing about those strange new things called personal computers. And then there is one last variation: the dark cautionary fable of "The Good and Innocent Person Who Finds the Rare and Valuable Item and is Taken Advantage of and Destroyed Utterly by the Forces of Greed, Avarice and Capitalism." John Steinbeck's "The Pearl" fits this scenario, as does David Mamet's play "The Water Engine," in which the brilliant young inventor of a water-fueled engine is killed by Detroit and the oil companies.
Well, this is one of those stories. All three, in fact.
Mark Erdmann and Arnaz Mehta were on their honeymoon. They'd had an idyllic wedding in Bali and were sightseeing with their friends John and Janel Intihar in Manado, North Sulawesi. Mark, a marine biologist, was going to be spending the next two years on the nearby island of Bunaken developing a coral reef preservation project. They decided to visit a real Indonesian fish market because Mark wanted to show his guests the astonishing bio-diversity to be found in Indonesian waters, which have the widest array of species anywhere in the world, making noted scuba destinations like the Maldives look like puddles in comparison.
Arnaz saw the strange fish first. A local fisherman was wheeling the 30 kilo monster past in a red wagon. "It caught my eye and I thought maybe it was a grouper. But it had these strange, reflective eyes and fleshy long fins. So I called Mark over and said, `Take a look at this fish.'"
Mark Erdmann recognized the fish as a coelacanth, and quickly began to explain to the other couple why the fish was important: its genetic material had not changed in more than 300 million years, making it renowned among fish experts as a "living fossil" whose existence offered a rare glimpse into the ancient world.
Meanwhile, Arnaz was talking to the fisherman, who seemed none to happy to be the center of attention. A crowd had gathered, pushing and jostling. "I asked him, 'Where did you get this fish?' and he just waved his hand to the ocean. 'Out there,' he said. 'How deep was it?' 'At the bottom of the sea.' 'Do you catch them often?' 'Rarely.'"
Erdmann had a dilemma. He knew immediately that he was looking at an important fish, but he didn't know how important. He wasn't an ichthyologist; he was a specialist in crustaceans, specifically stomatopods. It was baking hot that day and the fisherman was getting impatient with all the questions. The fisherman wanted to get a good price for the fish before it started to smell even worse.
And Erdmann wasn't sure it was a big find. He'd had experiences like this in the past and been burned, when he found what to him appeared to be a unique species and through great effort and expense brought it all the way back to the Smithsonian, only to be told that it wasn't important at all. And it wasn't on the itinerary to buy a huge, stinking fish and spend the rest of the day looking for a deep freeze, particularly since his guests were leaving later that day. "Ah, let's just leave the guy alone." Mark said, finally.
After John Intihar took a few pictures Mark stepped aside. The fisherman gratefully escaped, immediately selling the coelacanth to a fish trader. The honeymoon continued in spite of nagging worries in the back of Erdmann's mind. A few days later they were on a plane back to the U.S. At one point, Erdmann turned to Arnaz and said: "You know what? I have a feeling that it was a stupid thing not to buy that fish."
A Fish Stuck in Time
Why is the coelacanth important? To answer that question one must go back 1938, when the first coelacanth was discovered off the coast of South Africa. The fish was described as a "living fossil," a term coined by Darwin himself, who had postulated in the 1800s that many ancient species would probably be found at the bottom of the sea. In the 1930s, the theory of evolution was still quite controversial, and anything that buttressed Darwin's ideas was bound to attract media attention.
The coelacanth's existence did seem to confirm elements of the theory. The coelacanth was a common prehistoric fish whose fossil remains have been found all over the world. The earliest fossil evidence dates back more than 300 million years. The coelacanth's oddly articulated fins - which resemble the akimbo arms and legs of alligators in motion - indicate an evolutionary process that would eventually bring them out of the water, transforming them over millions of years into the giant lizards of much later Jurassic era. While the fossil evidence of the coelacanth was indisputable, it was hoped that examination of a living fish's internal organs could give insight into the biology of the ancient world. Unfortunately, the first coelacanth's inner organs were discarded, and the scientific community had to wait another 14 years before another was caught.
The second coelacanth was caught in French waters near the Comoro Islands off Madagascar. The early examination of this complete specimen's anatomy sparked great interest among the scientific community. The coelacanth was discovered to be the only living animal to have a functional intracranial joint - a complete division running through the braincase, separating the nasal organs and eye from the ear and brain. Of even more interest were its curious paired fins that moved in a coordinated fashion the same way humans move their arms and legs. Further giving credence to the theory of evolution were the coelacanth's ears, which appeared to be made for hearing in the air.
But the circumstances of the second coelacanth's capture and expatriation - the coelacanth's original discoverer, J.L.B. Smith, managed to spirit the fish away from the French authorities - incensed the French scientific community. Thereafter, no one but French scientists were given the right to examine coelacanths. Those few specimen that were placed in foreign scientific institutions were donated under the stipulation that they were not to be dissected nor their tissue samples examined. J.L.B. Smith was never allowed to examine another specimen.
This attitude of the French scientific community has engendered decades of resentment from foreign ichthyologists. The French monopoly over the coelacanth became a very serious issue for some non-French fish experts, whose careers came to depend on the vagaries of academic politics and the largesse of the French scientific institutes presiding over the 200 or so dead coelacanths that have been dragged out of the waters near Comoro over the past 60 years. Erdmann knew nothing about the politics of the coelacanth. His second mistake.
The Search Begins
Four days after spotting the coelacanth in the market, Erdmann was back at the University of California at Berkeley. The first thing he did was pay a visit his department head, Dr. Roy Caldwell, to ask him if a coelacanth had ever been found outside the western Indian Ocean.
"No, of course not. Why?" Caldwell replied. Erdmann shakes his head on recounting this moment, and quotes cultural icon Homer Simpson to indicate the pain and remorse associated with a major blunder: "Doe'uh!" Caldwell lobbied to get the word out, but Mark disagreed. "That won't help the situation and I'll just look stupid. We'll go back and get another one, and put some conservation measures in place to protect the rest," he said. They would contact a select group of coelacanth experts for advice after double checking the photos from the fish market.
But it was too late. John Intihar had already put the photos up on a website he had created called "Mark and Arnaz's Honeymoon Website." The phone was soon ringing off the hook with calls from flabbergasted ichthyologists. Intihar pulled the site quickly, after being warned that North Sulawesi was in danger of being overrun by bounty hunters. While the removal of the web site piqued the curiosity of many, others, like the eminent coelacanth expert Eugene Balon, immediately and publicly declared the find a "honeymoon hoax."
Mark and Arnaz returned to Sulawesi to spend the next two years working on a coral reef preservation program. But their first stop was the Manado fish market, where the old man with the red wagon was nowhere to be found. The next step was to get reprints of the coelacanth picture and distribute them around the market with an offer of a Rp.200,000 reward. "Most of the fishermen had absolutely no idea what it was. Or they would say, `I know what that is, it's a kabos laut - an oceanic mudskipper! I can get you hundreds of them!'"
More months passed. Erdmann decided to search beyond the fish market. He started to tour some of the outer islands, talking to local fisherman and leaving behind the photograph with these words printed on the back:
"Rp. 200,000 per tail, maximum three fish If you catch one, please bring it quickly and directly to Bunaken and look for Dr. Mark Erdmann in Pangalisang Beach. Please bring it immediately, before it starts to bad."
Erdmann started close to home, on the island of Bunaken. He mostly got blank stares, though a few fisherman saw the photo and referred to the fish as an ikan sede. These fisherman were old timers who utilized traditional hand-lining methods, fishing from boats almost identical to the traditional Comoran craft. The fact that the fish was typically found at a depth of more than 100 meters, near coral walls, was also similar to the Comoro conditions. The fishermen got very excited and said it wouldn't be long before they would bring one to Erdmann and collect the reward.
Erdmann was encouraged, but he decided not to leave it at that. In the ensuing weeks he headed to the next island, Pulau Nain, where shark net fisherman told him that the fish didn't look like anything they had ever seen. "You've never seen an ikan sede?" Erdmann asked. "Oh, sure we have. Catch them quite often. But that isn't an ikan sede," replied the fishermen.
Miscommunication, false leads, and confusion reigned. "It was getting depressing. We were starting to wonder if the first fish was just a fluke. And the people in the scientific community who were in on the secret were saying that the first fish was probably caught in the Comoros by a Japanese trawler who then dumped it in Manado when they realized they had a CITES protected fish," Erdmann recalls. Still, Erdmann continued to follow up leads and hand out the flyers. By the second week of March, 1998, almost seven months had passed since the fateful day in the Manado fish market. Mark and Arnaz took a trip to the next-door island of Manado Tua. While they took a hike up the volcanic slope their cook went to canvas the local fishermen. She was jumping up and down with excitement when Mark and Arnaz descended.
They were introduced to Om Lameh, a 56-year-old fisherman who spoke with authority. No, it wasn't an ikan sede, it was an ikan raja laut - the "King of the Sea." He caught two or three a year. He then introduced them to another gill-net fisherman named Maxon Haniko, who was also very familiar with the fish. Moments later, an familiar-looking old man appeared - Maxon's father. Erdmann began to recount, for the umpteenth time, the story of the discovery at the Manado fish market. The old man perked up quickly and cut him off. "That was me!" he exclaimed.
That particular fish, it turned out, had been caught by Maxon, who gave it to his father to sell. The old man laughingly recalled selling the fish to a fish trader, who immediately sold it an ethnic Chinese. The old man was amused because the Chinese buyer thought the fish was a grouper. He explained that the ikan raja laut had a reputation for causing diarrhea. "He probably spent the next week shitting oil," the old man laughed.
Erdmann raised the reward to 600,000, thinking that the amount was enough to get the fishermen excited but not enough to create a stampede of outsiders hoping to make a quick buck. He assumed that the Manado Tua crews would be able to catch a coelacanth fairly quickly. He was wrong. In the months that followed riots erupted across Indonesia, the economy collapsed, and President Soeharto resigned, but still no ikan raja laut. He did further research on the mysterious ikan sede and discovered that it was the relatively rare oil fish Ruvettus pretiosus. It looked nothing at all like the coelacanth, but it was notable as an indicator fish - meaning that it was often found along with the coelacanth in deep waters off Comoro.
Lightning Strikes Twice
On July 30, 1998, Mark and Arnaz were to take a trip to the city. Their boatman, Said, was just a bit late, and docked with more than the usual number of locals aboard. Said quickly bounded up the stairs from the dock to the Erdmann's porch, then assumed a posture of casual nonchalance, leaning languorously against the railing. Moments passed. "What is it?" Erdmann asked. Said tipped his head towards the dock. "I've got a raja laut in my boat," he said, as his usual deadpan expression broke into an ear-to-ear grin.
Mark and Arnaz raced down the stairs to the beach, where Om Lameh and his son Maxon were waiting. Maxon was holding a line, to which was tethered an obviously large fish, wallowing ponderously in the shallow waters. Yes, it was definitely a coelacanth. No doubt at all. And it was still alive - barely. "These fish are pretty tough, but this one had been in a net all night long, bleeding from a cut on the dorsal fin. Then they had it sitting on a deck for over an hour. It was by no means a happy fish. But here it was, after ten months of waiting."
The coelacanth kept rolling over on its back. Mark asked Said and Om Lameh to hold the fish for a moment and pose for a picture, and they did so, their faces breaking into wide smiles. Mark and Arnaz then suited up with their diving gear and underwater cameras and took the coelacanth out to the reef flat, where they photographed the fish underwater. Arnaz was worried that the bleeding fish might attract sharks, but Mark pushed on, taking the fish further out where the visibility in the water was better.
The coelacanth seemed to respond well to the change. Despite being tethered, it started to skull the water slowly with its fins. For the next 45 minutes, Arnaz and Mark swam alongside the fish, taking pictures all the while. The coelacanth didn't try to struggle or escape. It was a rapturous time. "I was mesmerized by the way its fins were moving," Arnaz recalled. "It was like a Balinese dancer. Just extremely graceful, with the fins all simultaneously moving in different directions. Like a slow, rhythmic dance."
"It had this gold flecking, these brilliant gold sparkles all over its body, which was not something we'd ever read about," Mark recalls. "It made us think more and more that this could be a new species, which is something that we had been wondering about since we had showed the snapshot photos around to the experts 10 months before."
"It was a much different experience than the first time, seeing a dead fish in the market," Mark explains. "This one was alive. And it is just a neat fish, a big, majestic fish with big, green, luminescent eyes. It was kind of otherworldly. It IS otherworldly. It is not from our realm of experience. It is a deep-sea sea monster. And you get that feeling when you get in the water and swim with one - not that too many other people ever will."
Mark realized time was running out for the King of the Sea, so he snapped out of his reverie and began to think like a scientist again. "My mind was racing with all the things we had to do, because there is a lot of sampling to be done." The film was finished, so Mark grabbed his dissecting kit, alcohol, sampling vials, and a container of liquid nitrogen. They lifted the huge fish up and placed it in a cooler box at the bottom of the boat. The coelacanth flapped its fins and gulped the air helplessly.
"I had this bad feeling - kurang enak is what the Indonesians would say. The fish was going to die, there was no doubt about that. There wasn't even a hope of releasing it and letting it go, even if we wanted to. But it took its time dying, and that was a bit hard to watch. Its big eyes would go back and forth, and look at me, then it would flop a fin a bit. It was sad."
"It had a kind of dignity. It was just sad that it had to be sacrificed," Arnaz recalls.
During the half-hour trip back to Manado the coelacanth was alive. But just as the boat moved in to dock at the harbor, the coelacanth's large luminous eyes dimmed and clouded. Mark, Arnaz, and the fishermen did not speak for a long time. The King of the Sea was gone.
Vipers
Mark quickly took tissue samples of the fish's heart, gills and liver and stored them in liquid nitrogen. Then he carefully packed the fish in a Styrofoam box which he stored in his landlady's freezer. With Roy Caldwell, and M. Kasim Moosa from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Erdmann began the process of writing a paper for the journal Nature, which appeared two months later.
Erdmann's discovery, now irrefutable, caused a predictable stir. "Second Home of the Fish from the Dinosaur Age Found," read The New York Times headline. The story also made CNN, BBC, ABC and FOX, with special emphasis on the "Storybook Honeymoon Adventure" angle. The Dinofish.com website received a record number of hits. But the effect on the rarefied world of coelacanth research was shattering - those who had earlier declared the find a hoax now had to eat their words, while certain others claimed to have been in on the secret the entire time. Mark was the center of a frenzy. He was invited to the National Science Foundation in the U.S. to discuss the implementation of conservation efforts, where he was roundly congratulated for his work. Before he left, however, one of the eminent scientists took him aside. "Be careful, Mark, because you've just stepped in a nest of vipers."
Susan Jewett, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, flew to Manado four days after the article appeared. She and Mark then accompanied the now-frozen fish to the Bogor Zoological Museum, where Indonesia's most renowned scientists were waiting. Before beginning the process of preserving the fish with formalin, which would destroy its cell structure, Erdmann and Jewett once again took tissue samples from the fish's inner organs. This would allow the Indonesians to do their own independent DNA tests. "We had a gentleman's agreement with the Scientists at LIPI [The Indonesian Institute of Sciences]. I gave them the last set of tissue samples, I donated it, because it was part of Indonesia's heritage. I said, 'Store these well, because they are incredibly valuable. When we've done our analysis in the U.S. we'll send you the primers and you can replicate and confirm the process in Indonesia. We can then show it to be a different species and bring in people, if necessary, to help write up the description, or you can do it yourself.'"
While it was certainly happy news that the coelacanth had a much larger range and population than was previously known, it had not gone unnoticed by French scientists that the coelacanth monopoly was broken. Within hours of the Nature article's publication, a French cyptozoological website was claiming that a French fishery consultant named George Serres had caught a coelacanth off the coast of Java in 1995. The claim could not be confirmed, however, because the fish was "lost" en route to the Oceanographic Institute in Jakarta. Serres claimed to have taken photographs of the fish, but those too were unavailable - all his belongings had been stolen at around the same time. By that time, Erdmann was in contact with dozens of French coelacanth specialists. He received an e-mail from one of them containing private messages that had inadvertently escaped deletion. One of these messages, from a French scientist, read: "If we could find someone who could verify that the specimen prepared by Monsieur Serres was still at the Institute in Jakarta, it would be a pretty counter-scoop with a nice nationalistic flavor."
Meanwhile, unlikely rumors were already circulating that Jewett was planning to smuggle the meter-long fish back to the United States in her suitcase. Erdmann found himself defending his motives and denying the rumors. "The first fish was always going to be Indonesia's," he explained.
After the fish had been preserved with formalin and LIPI's skilled taxidermists had posed it in a life-like position, Erdmann formally presented the specimen to the institute's museum exhibition. Back in Manado, something of a gold rush mentality took hold of the local population. People were now offering RP. 2,000,000 for a coelacanth. Om Lameh and Maxon were approached by five groups of Japanese, including a delegation from the Toba Aquarium of Tokyo who had, years before, fruitlessly spent millions in the Comoros trying to catch a living coelacanth.
By 1999, the preliminary results of the DNA testing were back from the lab. A sequencing of the DNA revealed a 4.1 percent divergence from the Comoran variety - a strong indication that the Indonesian coelacanth was in fact a new species. But Erdmann decided to wait for the results of a detailed morphological comparison before going public with such a controversial claim. When those results were available, in March of 1999, Erdmann decided to publish a paper in Nature supporting that position. But he was too late. As Erdmann's paper waited publication, a Jakarta-based catfish specialist, Laurent Pouyaud, reported the results of a Franco-Indonesian team's DNA tests in a French scientific journal. After lobbying several of the LIPI scientists and being turned down, Pouyaud had finally managed to convince one of them to part with coelacanth tissue samples to make another independent analysis. Pouyaud did not wait for independent verification and did not hesitate to declare that the Indonesian coelacanth was a new species, christening it "Latimeria menadoensis L. Pouyaud et al 1999."
Erdmann, along with many Indonesian scientists and others in the coelacanth community, was livid at this act of scientific piracy. Harsh words flew across cyber lines and in the letters pages of scientific journals. Many were outraged at what they claimed were Pouyaud's ethical and scientific lapses. He had made no reference to the discoverer of the specimen, its holotype, or its museum number, and had sought widespread publicity for the new name in the popular press before scientific publication. Nevertheless the name conformed to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, and so it stuck.
When a reporter brings up Pouyaud's name, Erdmann's genial smile disappears. "If I see him, I will kill him." Arnaz places a calming hand on Mark's thigh, saying "You can't say that to a reporter, honey." "But I really will kill him," Mark replies. "Pouyaud has absolutely nothing to do with this fish. But from now on, and forever, his name will be associated with it." Pouyaud responded to the controversy by saying that he had been urged to name the fish by his Indonesian colleagues. The Indonesian scientists at LIPI deny this assertion, and Pouyaud is banned from ever visiting the scientific institution in Bogor.
A few months later, Pouyaud, along with Serres and a well-known coelacanth expert Bernard Seret, submitted an article to Nature hoping to buttress Serres' claim of a Javan coelacanth. Included with the article was a "recently discovered" photo that they claimed to be of the fish caught in 1995. The editors of Nature were suspicious, and they brought the picture to Erdmann's attention.
"When I looked a the photograph I knew right away that it was the fish I caught," Erdmann said. "The coloring was identical - only the placement of the fins was slightly altered - very crudely, by the way." Serres, Pouyaud, or someone else had quite clearly falsified the picture using standard Photoshop software and a computer. The forgery was so obvious that the French Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD), for whom all three had worked, launched an investigation. Neither Serres or Pouyaud were named in the investigation; rather, the IRD launched a complaint 'against X' for forgery, a standard procedure in France when there is a criminal act committed by an unknown person.
Serres, as recently as July 2000, still maintained that the photograph was authentic, although he updated his story by claiming that the picture had been given to him by the widow of a close friend who had taken the photo. Bernard Seret, an ichthyologist at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, appears to have been duped by the entire affair. He now admits that the fish in the photograph is the fish caught by Erdmann. "This is very embarrassing," he was quoted in Nature. Still, a French name will forever be associated with the Indonesian coelacanth, and the French scientific community got their "nationalistic counter-scoop."
Bunaken
Erdmann now lives on Bunaken Island in North Sulawesi with Arnaz and his 18-month-old daughter. He's working to preserve the area as much as possible from the forces that are threatening the region's bio-diversity. It won't be easy. Despite being a maritime nation, Indonesia has a minimal and under-funded navy whose ships are often less well armed than the foreign fishing boats looting Indonesian waters. Just as damaging and dangerous are local and foreign fishermen who use cyanide and bombs to catch fish. The loss of the fish isn't the biggest problem, but rather the damage done to the coral reef framework beneath, which provides a spawning and feeding habitat for hundreds of species, and which will need centuries to recover.
Erdmann has been working to get the people of Bunaken to understand the importance of preserving their coral reefs. "One of our missions is to build a pride in what they have here. Most of the villagers have no idea why it is a park. They think someone in Jakarta just put their finger down on a map. We're saying, look, this is one of the neatest areas in the world. That is why it's a national park. You should have pride in it and that is reason in itself not to blow it up."
Recently Erdmann led a field trip at Bunaken for coral reef experts from the Caribbean. "They were just astonished at the variety of corals and fish species in Indonesian waters. To give you some idea of the bio-diversity here, the Bahamas has about 80 coral species. We have 500. As for the species I work with, crustaceans, they have 7 species. At Bunaken there are over 150. So there is really no comparison between the bio-diversity here and other places in the world." That argument doesn't always work with the fish bombers, who are often nomadic fisherman with no reason to care about the waters in any one area. "What I've been saying to anyone who will listen is that you need both a carrot and stick approach. The carrot is public education campaigns, the creation of jobs in the tourist industry - even giving money to people so they won't get involved in these destructive fishing practices, and I'm for all those things. But you've got to have a stick as well. You've got to have enforcement of the laws." Erdmann's NGO has also instituted a nominal fee of five dollars which local dive companies charge each diver. The money goes to augment the police and coast guard patrols in the area.
"Some people at the NGOs say we're hurting poor people who are forced by poverty to use these bombs to catch fish, but that isn't our experience here. In fact, the fish bombers are not poor - usually they are the richest people in the area. They've got the best boats, parabolas and nice houses. But they are getting rich as they destroy the livelihood of the rest of the community."
Erdmann also tried a tactic that was unusual in the area: he hired a lawyer. "This was a case where the bombers were caught red-handed, there were witnesses, but the police let them go because the bombers are well-connected. So we got a lawyer who literally hounded the police until they arrested them again. And now they are in jail. It worked. And I was just as surprised as the bombers were."
Mark Erdmann looks back on his experience with the Indonesian coelacanth with mixed feelings. "I can't deny that the coelacanth was a big boon to my career, but it certainly isn't a major focus of my life. We did what we thought was right for the coelacanth. I went to Jakarta, I worked with the Institute of Sciences and we got legislation passed to protect the fish. There's now a group called Team Coelacanth that monitors catches. And we did a public awareness campaign. Everyone in North Sulawesi know about this fish now, they are proud of it, and it is a flagship species for the Bunaken National Park -- it has really helped put us on the map. It focused attention on the management problems here, and that's what my focus is now, trying to protect Bunaken National Park."
"On the other hand, it completely ruined my naive view of the honor and dignity of science. What we saw was just an ugly, ugly side of science. We saw piracy, all kinds of chest beating - people saying, 'It's my discovery!' Stealing tissue samples, faked photographs - it was ugly, really ugly, what I saw there. I kind of laugh at it now, but - and that is part of the reason I really don't want to be involved with the coelacanth any more."
Erdmann pauses and falls quiet for a moment "It's not like I sit around worrying about coelacanths very much. They've managed pretty well for the past 300 million years, down there in their deep lairs."
Daniel McGuire is a freelance writer and filmmaker who lives in Bali.
OUTQUOTES:
1. Erdmann knew nothing about the politics of the coelacanth. His second mistake.
2. "What we saw was just an ugly, ugly side of science."
