[Ichneumon]

A typical example of the living-fossil phenomenon is the coelacanth, a species of fish first identified by scientists after being caught in deep water off the coast of Africa in 1938. Scientists had believed it had gone extinct 80 million years earlier, but the discovery showed the unusual fish instead had survived unchanged for over 340 million years.

A common misperception, but still wrong. The coelacanth has *not* survived "unchanged". Modern coelacanths are significantly changed from the 340-million-year-old ancestral version, to the point where they are assigned not only to different species, but even to a different genus altogether.

They're still recognizably in the same family, though, which is considerably less evolutionary change than, say, a modern pelican compared to its ancestral therapsid dinosaur over the same timespan, but the point remains that the coelacanth is not actually "unchanged", and its evolution did not somehow "stop" during the last 300+ million years.

And varying amounts of evolutionary change in different lineages is no challenge to "darwinism", as some like to claim, since Darwin himself predicted this effect in his "Origin of Species" book back in 1859.

[Stultis]

had survived unchanged

That always bother me too. Thanks for clarifying. Also it should be noted (I *think* I'm correct here) that our fossil lobe-fins are all shallow water species, whereas the living coelacanth is a deep water fish.