6th grade reading test

For hundreds of years sailors thought there were ... in the sea and they even drew them on maps. In 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who worked in a small museum in South Africa, found an unusual fish caught in a fisherman’s net. 

She ….. the fish under all the other fish in the net. She didn’t recognise it and thought it was an interesting fish for her museum. 

When she got back to the museum, she checked all her books to find out what it was. The nearest fish she could find was a prehistoric fish, which was extinct. She was very ….. , so she sent a drawing of the fish to a famous professor. 

The professor replied and told her that it was a ….. which had existed over 300 million years ago called a coelacanth! 

The professor offered a reward to anyone who found another coelacanth, but it took fourteen years before the first living coelacanth was discovered in the Comoros Islands. The people in those islands didn’t understand why someone wanted to pay ….. money for this fish.

In 1997, Mark Erdmann was on holiday in Indonesia when he saw a ….. blue fish in the market. He took pictures of the fish and when scientists saw them on the Internet, they contacted Mark and told him he was the first person to find this fish in Indonesia.