You're listening to the second and final part of Unexplained Season 7 Episode 3 under

Blackwater. One late December night in 1938, at the mouth of Shaluna Bay, just off the coast

of South Africa, Captain Hendrick Gusson smokes a cigarette on the bridge of his fishing

trawler, the Neurine. Reflections from the stars of southern constellations sparkle and

the car-motion waters as he watches the crew haul in the ship's nets. Just then, his

eye is momentarily caught by the sudden appearance of an oddly bluish-colored fin amid the thrashing

of fish and shark caught in the nets. But with so much work to be done, the captain

thinks little more of it as he finishes off his cigarette and heads down to help his

men on the deck. The next morning, Marjorie Courtney Latimer, a curator of natural history

at a small museum in the port town of East London on South Africa's eastern cape, receives

a phone call. A local fishing trawler manager wants to know if she's interested in taking

a look at a strange fish that has just been brought in. An hour or so later, she was stood

on the deck of the Neurine, scouring the mound of dead fish and sharks until she spots

it. An unusual, bluey grey fin poking out of one of the piles. About one and a half

meters long, the fish was heavily scaled, its fins rough and stocky, almost limb-like.

One fisher, standing nearby, tells Courtney Latimer that in more than 30 years of fishing

around the world, he's never seen anything like it. In fact, nobody was thought to have

ever seen anything like it since it was supposed to have gone extinct 66 million years ago.

The fish was a sealer canth, all that had been found of them prior to then were fossils

dating from 400 to 66 million years ago, at which point they were assumed to have gone

extinct with the dinosaurs. Finding a living one was like finding a tyrannosaurus rex, wandering

around your garden. It was a rare instance of what is sometimes called a Lazarus taxon,

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