Pre-dating the dinosaurs by millions of years and once thought to have gone extinct with them 65 million years ago, the Coelacanth was "discovered" alive and well in 1938! A coelacanth has been found in Indonesia 7,000 miles from its only previously known location near Madagascar. The ancestors of the coelacanth (pronounced SEE-la-kanth) date back 400 million years. Until 1938, scientists knew the coelacanth only as a fossil.