Question

The following is a passage about a prehistoric fish.

The Living Fossil

[1]
In 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a museum curator in South Africa, received a phone call from a local trawler captain who had cleared his nets of an unusual catch. Among the pile of common sharks and rays lay a five-foot-long, steel-blue fish with thick, limb-like fins and a strange, armored head. Courtenay-Latimer, unable to identify the strange creature, brought it to the museum and eventually wrote to her colleague, J.L.B. Smith, a prominent chemist and amateur ichthyologist. Upon examining the specimen, Smith was astounded; it was a coelacanth, a prehistoric fish believed to have gone extinct 66 million years ago. This remarkable discovery shook the scientific world, challenging the prevailing geological timeline and redefining our understanding of vertebrate evolution.

[2]
[___]. Smith spent the next fourteen years searching for a second specimen to prove that the South African catch was not a freak anomaly. He printed thousands of flyers offering a reward for another specimen, distributing them along the eastern coast of Africa. In 1952, a second coelacanth was finally caught off the coast of the Comoros Islands, confirming that a living population did indeed exist in the Indian Ocean. Over the subsequent decades, marine biologists have discovered that these 'living fossils' reside in deep-water caves, move with an unusual locomotive pattern, and have changed very little over millions of years. Today, the coelacanth remains a symbol of biological endurance and mystery.

Which of the following sentences, if placed in the blank in Paragraph 2, would provide the most logical transition from the first paragraph and introduce the main topic of the second paragraph?