A new ancient fish with a sharklike tail discovered in Canada was a fast-moving, aggressive predator, quite unlike its sluggish relatives today.
Today's coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) is famous for being a "living fossil." Researchers thought these large, paddle-tailed fish had gone extinct during the Cretaceous period — until a fisherman caught a living coelacanth off the east coast of South Africa in 1938.
Modern coelacanths, and most fossilized species, are slow moving, "lay-in-wait" type of predators, according to study researcher Mark Wilson, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta in Canada. But the new specimen, dubbed Rebellatrix divaricerca, had a forked tail, much like today's tuna or sharks.
"Fish with forked tails are able to achieve higher speeds and sustain them over a greater period of time," study researcher Andrew Wendruff, also of the University of Alberta, wrote in an email to LiveScience. "The forked tail of Rebellatrix indicated that it was a fast-moving, aggressive predator." [Images of the Rebel Coelacanth]
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