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Film News South Africa

Coelacanth documentary film at East London

A documentary about the coelacanth is using the East London museum and scuba diving sites off Tanzania and Sodwana Bay in KwaZulu-Natal and will feature a re-enactment of the discovery of the world's first coelacanth and its identification at the JBL Smith Institute of Ichthyology.

The documentary is due to be screened sometime next year. Its film crew is headed by Ben Hewitt who is hoping to capture live footage of a colony of coelacanths thought to be living off the African coastline in 100 metre waters.

The world's first coelacanth to be captured was caught off Chalumna River in 1938. The fish was taken to the East London museum and Professor James Smith of Rhodes University identified it as being a "living fossil" that was thought to have become extinct 70-million years earlier.

Filming of the documentary started in May and is due to be completed by March next year.

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