(Adapted from the book jacket)
Just before Christmas 19938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the young curator of a small South African museum, spotted a strange-looking fish on a trawler's deck. Determined to preserve her unusual find, she searched for days for a way to save it, but ended up with only the skin an a few bones. An amateur scientist, J. L. B. Smith, saw a sketch of the fish and was thunderstruck. He recognized it as a Coelacanth (pronounced see-la-kanth), a fish known from fossils dating back over four hundred million years, and thought to have become extinct with the dinosaurs.
So begins the hunt for the elusive coelacanth, to find other specimens, find where and how it lived, and to determine how many still survived. The discovery of the coelacanth was called the "greatest scientific find of the century." Not just a fish story, but a story of science, diplomacy and piracy.