In December 1938, museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovered a living coelacanth—a prehistoric fish thought to have gone extinct 66 million years ago—among a local fishing boat’s by-catch in South Africa, sparking one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the century.
The Fateful Catch Off the South African Coast
In the 1930s, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer worked as a curator at the East London Museum in South Africa. She maintained a simple working relationship with local fishing fleets, asking captains to notify her whenever unusual marine life turned up in their nets. On December 22, 1938, that routine request paid off in an extraordinary way. The captain of a trawler named the Nerine contacted her about an odd specimen hauled up off the coast.
Putting aside a fossil reptile display, Courtenay-Latimer took a taxi down to the docks to inspect the haul. Beneath a layer of slime lay a creature unlike anything documented in museum archives. “I picked away at the layer of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen,” she recalled to Anthony Smith for The Guardian. The specimen measured almost 1.5 meters (5 feet) in length. It featured a pale mauvy blue hue with faint whitish spots, an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen, hard scales, four limb-like fins, and a strange puppy-dog tail.
Scientific Skepticism and the Race Against Decomposition
Transporting a massive, unfamiliar fish in the trunk of a local taxi proved challenging enough, but the real hurdles began inside the museum. The institution’s chairman took one look at the specimen and dismissed Courtenay-Latimer’s suspicions, suggesting it was nothing more than a rock cod. Reference books in the museum offered zero clarity.
Compounding her problem, local morgues refused to let her store the carcass in their cold rooms. With decomposition threatening to destroy the evidence, she had no choice but to have the fish gutted and taxidermied. Only after the taxidermy process was complete did she receive a breakthrough. She had mailed a rough sketch of the fish to James Leonard Brierley Smith of Rhodes University in Grahamstown (now Makhanda).
Smith finally arrived at the museum on February 16, 1939, to examine the stuffed specimen. The impact was immediate and visceral. “Although I had come prepared, that first sight hit me like a white-hot blast and made me feel shaky and queer, my body tingled,” Smith wrote in his book Old Fourlegs: The Story Of The Coelacanth. “I stood as if stricken to stone. Yes, there was not a shadow of doubt, scale by scale, bone by bone, fin by fin, it was a true coelacanth.”
A Prehistoric Survivor and Its Modern Legacy
The discovery stunned the global community. Coelacanths had vanished from the fossil record around 66 million years ago, coinciding with the dinosaurs’ downfall. Finding a living representative swimming in modern oceans upended established timelines.
Scientists named the species Latimeria chalumnae in honor of the curator and the river close to where the fish was found. Smith later contributed to a search that eventually located a second coelacanth fourteen years later. Today, researchers recognize at least two living coelacanth species: L. chalumnae and the Indonesian coelacanth, L. menadoensis.
While the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists coelacanths as critically endangered, their continued existence underscores the vital role of museum collections and the bright brains who run them. Brian Sidlauskas highlighted the importance of that training when reflecting on the historic find: “The classic story of Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovering the coelacanth off of South Africa – not the first living person, of course, to have seen a coelacanth, but someone who had the training to recognize that this thing was unusual.”
