Coelacanth genome surfaces: Unexpected insights from a fish with a 300-million-year-old fossil record

Wednesday, April 17, 2013 - 13:00 in Paleontology & Archaeology

An international team of researchers has decoded the genome of the African coelacanth. The species was once thought to be extinct, but a living coelacanth was discovered off the African coast in 1938. Coelacanths today closely resemble the fossilized skeletons of their more than 300-million-year-old ancestors. Its genome confirms what many researchers had long suspected: genes in coelacanths are evolving more slowly than in other organisms.

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