The case history approach has an impressive record of success in a variety of disciplines. Collections of case histories, casebooks, are now widely used in all sorts of specialties other than in their familiar appli cation to law and medicine. The case method had its formal beginning at Harvard in 1871 when Christopher Lagdell developed it as a means of teaching. It was so successful in teaching law that it was soon adopted in medical education, and the collection of cases provided the raw material for research on various diseases. Subsequently, the case history approach spread to such varied fields as business, psychology, management, and economics, and there are over 100 books in print that use this approach. The idea for a series of Casehooks in Earth Science grew from my experience in organizing and editing a collection of examples of one variety of sedimentary deposits. The prqject began as an effort to bring some order to a large number of descriptions of these deposits that were so varied in presentation and terminology that even specialists found them difficult to compare and analyze. Thus, from the beginning, it was evident that something more than a simple collection of papers was needed. Accordingly, the nearly fifty contributors worked together with George de Vries Klein and me to establish a standard format for presenting the case histories.

Tells the story of a fish, the coelacanth, thought extinct for 70 million years, which was discovered in 1938 in the Indian Ocean.

World-class palaeontologists and biologists summarise the state-of-the-art on fish evolution and development.

The purpose of this book is to give an account of the life and times of a single species of fish, Latimeria chalumnae- the coelacanth (or are there now two species?). Before the discovery of the modern Latimeria, relationships of the coelacanths were thought to lie with the rhipidistians, a group of fossil fishes that many think are tetrapod ancestors. Hence, by looking at the modern coelacanth and assuming conservatism we may be able to reconstruct the life of the 'missing link' between fishes and tetrapods. The coelacanth is the only living animal to retain some structuralcharacteristics that were certainly present in the tetrapod ancestors, such as the intracranial joint. Therefore it is of some interest to try and find out how this joint works and what it is there for. The gene pool of the coelacanth has been separated from that of all other living vertebrates for at least 360 million years. Therefore, it is of some interest to find out how much deviation from contemporaneous fishes there has been. Coelacanths have often been used as the classic example of a particular evolutionary pattern whereby evolution is very fast in the early years and then slows down to stability and finally stagnation. This needs to be evaluated in the light of what we now know of the history of the coelacanths as a genetic lineage.