FOSSIL FISH FOUND ALIVE
By Sally M. Walker
Carolrhoda Books, 2002
Category: Middle Grade Non-Fiction
Reading this book was an awakening for me. It was while turning its pages that I finally realized I could combine my passion for science (not to mention my years of training) and my love of story. It seems obvious now that I was destined to write about science for children, but it was glaringly unobvious for most of my early adulthood. Science was what I did during the day, writing was what I did in my spare time. But In 2003, after reading FOSSIL FISH FOUND ALIVE, all that changed. I started writing about science and the scientists who most intrigued me. Four years later, my first book is about to hit bookshelves, and I will always credit Sally Walker’s book for its part in that miracle.
Imagine my excitement, then, when I found in my Inbox the other day an email from … Sally Walker. I kid you not. She wrote to congratulate me on TRACKING TRASH, and to tell me how much she enjoyed it. Sally Walker wrote to me. And she said, about my little book, “Congratulations! It’s totally fascinating.”
Woo-hoo!
So, of course, I had to re-read FOSSIL FISH FOUND ALIVE. The story intrigued me all over again:
In 1938, a museum curator in South Africa stumbles upon an unusual fish in the market, and she brings it back to her museum for further study. There is something about the fish that tickles her memory; it reminds her of fossil fishes she learned about as a student, fishes long thought to be extinct. In hard-to-resist narrative, Walker takes readers from the shores of South Africa to the islands of Indonesia to the depths of the oceans to discover if the coelacanth, a fish that predates dinosaurs by millions of years, is actually still alive. This is one fishing trip you don’t want to miss.