Perhaps one interesting organism that has had a bizarre evolution is the coelacanth. Literally, it looks almost the same even after 360 million years! With that long time in existence and so little observable morphological change, the platypus seems to be eating the coelacanth’s dust when it comes to being which looks more like a living fossil. According to McGrouther (2021), with a peak in abundance around 240 million years ago, coelacanths were known to have become extinct 80 million years ago. But, alas! They were rediscovered in 1938 when one specimen was caught at the mouth of the Chalumna River on the east coast of South Africa. As explained by Nelson et al. (2016), Coelacanths are an ancient group of lobe-finned fish in the class Actinistia. As sarcopterygians, they are more closely related to lungfish and tetrapods—a group that includes mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles—than they are to ray-finned fish. There are currently only two known marine extant species of coelacanths: the West Indian Ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae), which is mainly found near the Comoro Islands off the east coast of Africa, and the Indonesian coelacanth (Latimeria menadoensis) in the waters of North Sulawesi as well as Papua and West Papua. Although the species look very similar, they have differences in size and the number of fins. Roberts et al. (2018) & Amemiya et al. (2013) state that the adult Indonesian coelacanth typically measures around 1.5 meters (5 feet) in length, although West Indian Ocean coelacanths can grow as long as 2 meters (6.5 feet). As a result, the Indonesian coelacanth is typically smaller than the West Indian Ocean coelacanth. The West Indian Ocean coelacanth has seven or eight fins, whereas the Indonesian coelacanth typically has six. In a comparison between populations of coelacanths in Tanzania and Comoro, researchers have found that the differences between groups of coelacanths extend beyond the physical. Nikaido et al. (2011) discovered that some fish from Tanzania have distinctive genetic variations and no fish from Comora or anywhere else had these varieties. This has led them to believe that coelacanths from northern Tanzania constitute a distinct breeding population from those from the southern and Comoros regions and that the two populations may eventually evolve into distinct species in the future. However, it is still quite fascinating how the coelacanths of today look really similar to what they looked like 360 million years ago. Is it not crazy? According to Stromberg (2013), some scientists believe that coelacanths’ slow evolutionary transformation is caused by their extremely stable deep Indian and Indonesian Ocean environments and relative lack of predators.