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ZANZIBAR, Tanzania (AP) - Fishermen have caught a rare and endangered fish, the coelacanth, off the coast of the Indian Ocean archipelago of Zanzibar, a researcher said on Monday.
The find makes Zanzibar the third place in Tanzania where fishermen have caught the coelacanth, a heavy-bodied, many-finned fish with a three-lobed tail that was thought extinct until it was caught in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. Since then two types of coelacanth have been caught in five other countries: Comoros, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar and Mozambique, according to African Coelacanth Ecosystem Program.
"Fishermen informed us that they caught a strange fish in their nets. We rushed to Nungwi (the northern reaches of Zanzibar) to find it's a coelacanth, a rare fish thought to have become extinct when it disappeared from fossil records 80 million years ago," said Nariman Jiddawi of the Institute of Marine Sciences, which is part of the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania's commercial capital.
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