Ancient Web: Dinofish Made the Coelacanth a Lifelong Web Investigation

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A fish supposedly known only from fossils turned up alive in 1938. Decades later, Jerome Hamlin made a substantial portion of his life—and a remarkable personal website—about finding out what happened next.

Visit Dinofish.com

Dinofish.com is an old-style specialist archive about coelacanths, the deep-water fishes whose survival became a famous scientific surprise. Hamlin's site collects expedition histories, scientific articles, photographs, maps, anatomy information, conservation news, and a vast index of named people and subjects. The point is not simply that the fish looks prehistoric. It is that the evidence about its living populations took generations of difficult work to assemble.

The webmaster was part of the story

Hamlin did more than collect links. His recollections describe attempts to recover and study accidentally caught coelacanths around the Comoro Islands. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he helped organize expeditions and equipment for keeping specimens alive long enough to study them. The account includes negotiations, transport problems, aquarium tanks, letters, and eventually fax machines. Scientific adventure rarely has enough room in the movie for the paperwork.

The site's timeline also records the 1997 Indonesian fish-market discovery by Arnaz and Mark Erdmann, which led to confirmation of a living population far from the Comoros. The Indonesian coelacanth page traces how a honeymoon photograph became an important research lead.

This is not merely a solitary enthusiast's unsupported narrative. A contemporary PBS NOVA resource page recommended Dinofish.com as an unusually informative coelacanth resource, describing its anatomy, behavior, video, and enthusiast material.

The original site has a decidedly frame-era structure. Some old entry points are less reliable than its surviving interior pages, and modern research updates coexist with much older material. That mixture is a virtue for historical readers: one can follow how questions, reports, and theories changed rather than reading a newly smoothed-over retrospective.

Hamlin's first-person accounts are evidence of his participation and perspective, not independent verification of every disputed interpretation. The fish is real; the fascinating questions about where it lives and how people studied it remain visible.

Explore the expedition chronology and original Dinofish archive.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.