Ancient ‘living fossil’ fish has scales that act as adaptable armour

coelacanth

Wrapped in adaptable armour

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The coelacanth fish is a living fossil, its appearance little changed in hundreds of millions of years. A new analysis of its scaly armour may reveal how it has stuck around for so long.

“Nature seems to generate combinations of properties that we have great difficulty with. I’m interested in how strong a material is and also how tough,” says Robert Ritchie at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “That combination is incompatible in synthetic materials, but nature does it with ease.”

He and his colleagues examined scales from a coelacanth …