Coelacanth Anatomy Was Botched

Researchers determine that
it is less of a transitional form
than evolutionists thought

The famous “living fossil” fish coelacanth was thought long extinct for tens of millions of years until 1938, when one was caught by a fishing boat off the African coast. Since then, more living examples have been found around India and Africa. This prime example of a “Lazarus Taxon” back from the dead had been considered an evolutionary transition between fish and tetrapods, because to early Darwinists, its bony fins looked like legs trying to emerge by natural selection. That idea perished when living coelacanths were found swimming in a head-down position, not using the bony fins for walking on the sea bottom at all.

The oldest coelacanth fossils have been dated at 400 million Darwin Years old, and they were thought to go extinct about 66 million Darwin Years ago. A degree of variability exists within this group, called sarcopterygians (order Coelacanthiformes), as with most taxons. Only two living species in the genus Latimeria exist today. There are approximately 100 species of coelacanths known from fossils. The body plan, nevertheless, is easily distinguishable from other bony fish in the actinopterygian group of osteichthyes (bony fish, as distinguished from cartilaginous fish, or chondrichthyes, like sharks and rays). All these groups have extant and extinct representatives, so where is the evolution? Each group appears fully formed in the fossil record and, with variability up to the family level, remains distinctive throughout its appearances. Creationists accept variability up to the family level.

The only way to link them to a single common ancestor is with imagination, using phylogenetic trees to “connect the dots” of particular traits between groups. But phylogeny (tree-building) is a case of circular reasoning. Evolutionists assume common descent and the geologic column before they look at the data. They feel their job is to place each animal into Darwin’s tree instead of to question the tree. They rarely if ever consider how Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law could have caused its complex structures to have “emerged” by mutation and selection.

Professor J.L.B. Smith with a coelacanth in 1953. From Wiki Commons. Some specimens reach 6.5 feet in length.

A Closer Look

For the first time, two anatomists have carefully dissected the head of a coelacanth, identifying every muscle and ligament. It was difficult to find museum specimens to dissect because of their rarity. Aléssio Datovo (University of Sao Paolo), helped by G. David Johnson, a leading fish anatomist who died in 2024 before the study was completed, reported the work that has just been published open access in Science Advances. Science Daily gave its copy of the press release this provocative title: “400-million-year-old fish exposes big mistake in how we understood evolution.”

New examination of fish considered a ‘living fossil’ changes our understanding of vertebrate skull evolution (FAPESP, 28 July 2025). This is the original press release. To be clear, the anatomists are not doubting evolution; like many other biologists, they simply assume it. Nevertheless, they found many mistakes that had been unquestioned for decades. The “big mistake” is found in this section:

Seeing each muscle and nerve firsthand allowed the authors to identify what was actually in the coelacanth’s head with certainty, point out previously undescribed structures, and correct errors that had been repeated in the scientific literature for over 70 years.

“There were many contradictions in the literature. When we finally got to examine the specimens, we detected more errors than we’d imagined. For example, 11 structures described as muscles were actually ligaments or other types of connective tissue. This has a drastic consequence for the functioning of the mouth and breathing, because muscles perform movement, while ligaments only transmit it,” he explains.

Due to the position of coelacanths in the vertebrate tree of life, the discovery impacts our understanding of cranial evolution in all other large vertebrate groups.

Again, they are not questioning evolution or the vertebrate tree of life, but only the coelacanth’s position in the story.

Upon re-examining the cranial musculature of the African coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae), the authors discovered that only 13% of the previously identified evolutionary muscle novelties for the largest vertebrate lineages were accurate. The study also identified nine new evolutionary transformations related to innovations in feeding and respiration in these groups.

Let that sink in: Fully 87% of “evolutionary muscle novelties for the largest vertebrate lineages” were inaccurate! The new story puts these large fish closer to sharks and rays than to ray-finned fish, in their storytelling account, because muscles thought to allow them to suck in food were really ligaments that cannot move. But they don’t resemble sharks in appearance.

The term “innovations” in this quote only makes sense in the Darwinian interpretation. It makes no sense if the coelacanth body plan was designed. To believe the Darwinian story, one would have to believe that functional innovations emerged by chance. How scientific is that?

Coelacanths illuminate deep-time evolution of cranial musculature in jawed vertebrates (Science Advances, 30 April 2025). Here is the paper, dated 3 months before the press release announced it. Datovo and Johnson mention evolution 21 times in the paper, but they never mention mutation or natural selection, and only slightly mention phylogeny, novelty or innovation.

Focus your attention, instead, on Figure 1. Look at all those parts, perfectly fitted together with mouth, teeth, bones, muscles, ligaments, blood vessels, nerves and all the requirements for life. It had openings for complex eyes and structures that look engineered for function, all coordinated as to size, shape and position. Those should be the focus of science, not evolutionary stories about how they “emerged” by chance. Darwinism obscures the most important parts of the story with fogma, distracting readers to think about how these fish were connected by common ancestry, as if all those well-fitted parts just “emerged” in the dim, unobservable past, by chance. But consider, too: they have to believe that these parts worked well for hundreds of millions of years! If they were poorly designed, wouldn’t coelacanths have gone extinct much sooner in their time scheme? And why did NO fossils of coelacanths appear for 66 million years between the last extinction and 1938? Clearly coelacanths were having babies all that time!

Fig. 1. Cranial musculoskeletal system of African coelacanth, L. chalumnae, with associated motor branches of cranial nerves. From Datovo and Johnson, Science Advances (2025).

Phylogenetic Distortions

Another factor to consider can be seen in Wikipedia’s phylogenetic diagram of the coelacanth lineage (scroll down under “Timeline of Genera”). It may appear at first that evolutionists have figured out all the connections, but the only observational facts (fossils and living specimens) are represented by solid bars here and there. The dark horizontal bars indicate when species appeared fully formed and then went extinct. The thin black lines connecting them are only inferred because of shared traits. The dotted lines are “ghost lineages” where a species appears in the geological column assigned one age, then disappears and reappears later in another age. Lazarus rose from the dead many times!

At the bottom right, Latimeria (the living coelacanth) appears as a dot in the present, with no fossil representative since 66 million Darwin Years ago. Is that credible? If one were to dispense with the geologic column timeline and the evolutionary assumptions, the observations could fit within a Genesis timeline with most of the species going extinct a few thousand years ago in the Flood.

The Great Darwini attempts a daring escape! Watch and share this Short Reel about this article. Click to view.

Coelacanth Genes Mapped, “Living Fossil” Evolved Slowly (National Geographic, 19 April 2013). The press release (above) contained a link to this 12-year old story. It gives another reason to doubt the evolution of the coelacanth. “When the study authors sequenced the ancient fish’s genome,” the short article says, “they found that its genes have been evolving more slowly than the genes of the other fish or terrestrial vertebrates they looked at, including sharks, chickens, and lungfish.” This is another conundrum in Darwinism: evolution is fast except when it is slow. They try to explain this by saying that coelacanths live deep in dark places hidden from predators:

In the paper, published April 18 in the journal Nature, the researchers speculate that the coelacanth’s relatively unchanged deep-sea habitat, and an apparent lack of predation over thousands to millions of years, means this ancient fish didn’t need to change much to survive.

…emphasis on speculate. Their “speculation” sounds like special pleading to preserve Darwinism from the data. Was it thousands of years, or millions? Did the habitat remain unchanged for tens of millions of years under the sea on our dynamic globe? Fossils show there were huge predators in the ocean for all those millions of Darwin Years; how did the coelacanth escape? And does evolution somehow respond to needs? Did the coelacanth say to itself, “Well; I’m safe here, so I don’t need to evolve”?

From every angle, the evolutionary story of the coelacanth is ridiculous. Scientists stand by it because of (1) inertia and (2) necessity. They have to believe evolution, otherwise they might be afraid of accountability to a Creator who designed all those parts in Figure 1, and all the parts in their own bodies. Darwinism keeps them gainfully employed, gives them camaraderie with other materialists, and lets them wear a D-Merit Badge to feel sophisticated. But saying “stuff happens” to every observation is not very sophisticated, now, is it?

Search on “coelacanth” at this site for dozens of earlier articles on this fish, and more about living fossils and Lazarus taxa.