Creature from the Black Lagoon.

What's ancient, smelly, and extremely hard to find? Don't head for your bedroom closet. It's the coelacanth (SEE-luh-kanth), the world's rarest and one of its oldest surviving fish. The coelacanth is a sluggish 70-kilogram (154-lb) creature with steel-blue scales, pale spots, and fleshy fins.

Scientists had long thought the prehistoric fish had gone the way of dinosaurs into extinction more than 65 million years ago. Then, in 1938 a South African fisherman made world headlines when he netted a coelacanth. (The discovery inspired the classic horror flick The Creature from the Black Lagoon.) Now, on the 60th anniversary of the fish's startling rediscovery, the coelacanth may be dying out for real. How come?

Natural history museums have scooped up hundreds of dead specimens caught by local fishermen. Public aquariums are racing to be the first to exhibit a live coelacanth. Unfortunately, warm surface water kills coelacanths (they're used to 13[degrees]C/55[degrees]F)--none has survived capture for more than 20 hours.

The dwindling number of coelacanths lurk in frigid deep-sea caves near the remote Comoros Islands, 322 km (200 mi) off the east coast of Africa. A new survey numbers the endangered population at just 300. (A second colony was recently found in Indonesia.) The fish is spotted only about a half dozen times a year, when native fishermen paddling dugout canoes haul them aboard by accident. They don't even think about eating one--they're too oily. Native Comorans use coelacanth scales as sandpaper to roughen bicycle inner tubes before applying a patch; otherwise, they consider the specimen useless.

Zoologists (scientists who study animals), on the other hand, value the coelacanth as a living fossil. Because they look the same today as they did 300 million years ago, coelacanths are a surviving record of a critical period when fish prepared to crawl out of the water onto dry land. The four flipper-like fins that protrude from the coelacanth's bony torso are the stunted beginnings of legs. "The coelacanth is our closest living relative in the fish world," says John Maisey, a scientist who studies primitive life. "If it goes extinct, 400 million years of history are lost."