In April 1939, New Zealand's Auckland Star proclaimed that the Loch Ness monster, a sensation that had caught the world's attention not long prior, had been 'outdone'.

Making up for the world's disappointment that there wasn't a prehistoric creature living in a Scottish loch was the South African discovery of a strange, steel blue fish with limb-like fins.

The fish was a coelacanth, one of a group that was thought to have gone extinct 70 million years earlier. But this one was alive.