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