The sensational discovery of living coelacanths in 1938 caused a worldwide media frenzy, as a fish with a fossil record far older than the dinosaurs, and thought to have become extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago had miraculously survived to modern times. It was hailed as the zoological discovery of the century and equated to finding a living dinosaur!

As Curator of the East London Museum, Miss Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a most enterprising young woman, had built up a good relationship with anglers and the crew of fishing trawlers who often brought her odd specimens for the Museum. Late on the morning of 22nd December 1938 she received a message from the manager of lrvin and Johnson that the Nerine had docked and that there were some fish samples for her collection. In two minds about going - it was so near Christmas, it was a very hot day and she had plenty to do - she ultimately decided to go and wish the crew a happy Christmas and see what fish they had brought to her. Sorting through the pile of sharks and skates, she found "the most beautiful fish I had ever seen ... It was 5 feet long and a pale mauve-blue with iridescent silver markings."

Miss Latimer subsequently learnt that Captain Hendrik Goosen and his crew had caught the 150cm, 57.5kg fish the day before in a trawl net at a depth of about 70 metres off the Chalumna River, southwest of East London. The strange blue fish lived for several hours on the deck of the Nerine and snapped at the hand of the captain.

Miss Latimer resolved to take the fish to the museum and with the help of her assistant they carried it in a bag to a taxi whose driver transported them under heavy protest back to the museum. This was only the start of Miss Latimer's problems in her attempts to preserve the fish. The museum had no facilities or equipment to preserve such a large specimen and both a local cold-storage warehouse and the mortuary refused to store the smelly carcass. In the end she decided to take it to a taxidermist. After unsuccessfully consulting her meagre reference books, she drew a rough sketch and sent this together with a letter to Dr JLB Smith, a senior lecturer in chemistry at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, requesting his assistance in identifying the strange looking fish. Smith was also a self-taught ichthyologist and had already published several papers on the marine fishes of South Africa.

Marjorie's famous sketch

Smith at that time was at his holiday home in Knysna, marking examination papers. Due to his academic commitments, he could not go immediately to East London as much as he dearly wished, for upon receipt of the letter from Miss Latimer (eleven days later on 3 January 1939) which had been forwarded to him from Grahamstown, he had been in a rare stew, agonising about the implications of this unique find. His brain told him it was impossible, yet the details on the sketch indicated that it was a member of the group known as the Crossopterygii and in particular, a coelacanthid, which had supposedly become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period, some 70 million years ago! He had to see the specimen before he committed himself and he knew that if he identified it as a coelacanth, he would face the incredulity of the world and his credibility would be questioned. Smith immediately did two things: he wired Miss Latimer to preserve the viscera and the skeleton at all costs and also telegraphed Dr K H Barnard of the South African Museum in Cape Town with a request to forward a volume dealing with the Crossopterygii. This he received on 6 January 1939.

Regrettably, when she failed to hear from Smith three days after sending her letter, Miss Latimer gave the order to discard the innards as they had putrefied in the heat of the South African summer. Unfortunately this precluded the opportunity to study the soft anatomy of the coelacanth. Nevertheless Miss Latimer wrote to Smith on 4th January 1939 to say that "There was no skeleton and that the backbone was a column of soft white gristle-like material, running from skull to tail - this was an inch across and filled with oil - which spouted out as cut through - …" In her letter, Miss Latimer also notified Smith that the specimen was being mounted and that the taxidermist was coping quite well in spite of the copious quantity of oil that seeped from the skin of the animal.

When Smith learnt that the fish was being mounted, he felt there was no longer any urgency in examining the fish and that he could safely apply himself to his examination commitments until he had the opportunity to visit East London. However, the discovery nevertheless consumed him and he wrote to Miss Latimer requesting more details and a scale of the fish for diagnostic purposes. He also wrote to Dr Barnard mentioning his belief that a coelacanth had been discovered and requested his confidentiality in the matter. Dr Barnard's reply was evidently "couched in such incredulous and facetious terms" that Smith feared was only a foretaste of what was to come and this was another reason for his delay in departing for East London. He was beset by doubts, and disbelief and feared facing the scorn and derision of the scientific community for identifying the fish. When the fish scales arrived all his doubts were laid to rest. In his letter to Miss Latimer dated 7th February 1939, he wrote:

" Many thanks for your letter and for the parcel of three scales. They leave little doubt about the nature of the fish, but even so my mind still refuses to grasp this tremendous impossibility."

The Smiths departed from Knysna on 8th February 1939 with the intention of heading straight to East London. However, as luck would have it, the roads were flooded and impassable and, although they reached Grahamstown safely, they had to wait a further week before leaving for East London and arrived there on 16th February. In his book entitled "Old Fourlegs, The Story of the Coelacanth" published in 1956, Smith wrote:

"We went straight to the Museum. Miss Latimer was out for the moment, the caretaker ushered us into the inner room and there was the - Coelacanth, yes, God! 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. 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. It could have been one of those creatures of 200 million years ago come alive again. I forgot everything else and just looked and looked, and then almost fearfully went close up and touched and stroked, while my wife watched in silence. Miss Latimer came in and greeted us warmly. It was only then that speech came back, the exact words I have forgotten, but it was to tell them that it was true, it was really true, it was unquestionably a Coelacanth. Not even I could doubt any more."

Smith named the fish Latimeria chalumnae in honour of Miss Latimer who had preserved it, and the river near which it was trawled. From February to June 1939 JLB Smith and his young wife, Margaret, who also became an renowned ichthyologist in her own right, worked furiously on the first scientific paper describing the coelacanth, completing it just four days before the birth of their son, William.

Text primarily based on articles from the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity.