Wrapped in adaptable armour Getty
The coelacanth fish is a living fossil, its appearance little changed in hundreds ofĀ millions of years. A new analysis of its scaly armour may reveal how it has stuckĀ around for so long.
āNature seems to generate combinations of properties that we have great difficulty with. Iām interested in how strong a material is and also how tough,ā says Robert Ritchie at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. āThat combination is incompatible in synthetic materials, but nature does it with ease.ā
He and his colleagues examined scales from a coelacanth that had been…
