Following the sensational discovery of the first specimen and the subsequent excitement in the scientific community, the public and the media the world over, Smith's abiding passion was to hunt for the home of the coelacanth. It was of great importance to find a second, intact specimen. By the late 1940's, there was little doubt that the East London coelacanth was a stray, and JLB Smith deduced that the home of the coelacanth was to the north, probably in the Mozambique Channel. A poster in English, French and Portuguese depicting a coelacanth and offering a reward of £100 was printed and distributed widely along the whole east coast of Africa and Madagascar.

During the next fourteen long years the Smiths made a number of expeditions to tropical East Africa, studying marine fishes and talking about the coelacanth. Whilst on an expedition to Zanzibar and Kenya in December 1952 they met Captain Eric Hunt who traded about the Comoros Islands. Margaret Smith told him about their search for the home of the coelacanth and gave him a quantity of the reward posters to distribute. On board the ship Dunnottar Castle in Durban ten days later during their return to South Africa, the Smiths received a cable which had been forwarded from Smith's office in Grahamstown. It was from Hunt to say that he had a coelacanth at the Comoros, caught on the 20th and had injected it with formalin.

The second coelacanth had been caught by a fisherman, Ahamadi Abdallah, near the village of Domoni on the island of Anjouan.

Samantha Weinberg records in her book A Fish Caught in Time that: Smith wrote:"...after a few hours he hooked a big fish, at a depth of 160m, which he killed by battering its head. Satisfied with his catch, he returned to his village, and left the fish outside his hut, without scaling or gutting it. The next morning he took it to the beach to clean... he was approached by a local teacher called Affane Mohamed...who recognised the fish as being very similar to the one on the leaflet. The instructions were clear: 'Do not cut it or clean it or scale it, but take it at once to some responsible person.' Mohammed urged Abdallah to stop what he was doing and took him to where the poster was displayed... Legend has it that Abdallah lugged his precious 82 pound (37kg) cargo by foot in the sweltering heat across twenty-five miles of mountainous terrain, but according to Keynes's investigations, he managed to get a lift on a public works truck... by the time he reached Hunt the fish had already started to putrefy. Hunt immediately recognised it as a coelacanth and stated to work out a way to save it for Smith."

Again it seemed that history was about to repeat itself. It was the 24th of December 1952, the day before Christmas, how was Smith supposed to get to the Comoros on such short notice and would Hunt have enough formalin to preserve the specimen? There were no refrigeration facilities in the Comoros and the stifling tropical conditions would mean the specimen would rot quickly. There were no commercial airports and fuel was a problem. It also became imperative to fetch the fish as there was a real danger that the French would claim it as it had been landed on French soil (The Comoros being a French colony at the time). Smith resorted to contacting the Government of South Africa for their assistance in retrieving the specimen. After many "agonising and fruitless hours at the telephone" he managed to speak to the Prime Minister, Dr D.F. Malan, who promised to arrange for a military aircraft to transport Smith to the Comoros. Smith wrote in a paper titled "The Two Coelacanths" dated 10th January 1953:

"Our troubles were not over, for storms broke down the telephone system that had to carry Dr Malan's orders. Finally a huge Dakota plane picked me up at Durban early on the morning of the 28th. We slept at Lumbo in Portuguese East Africa (Now Mozambique -ed.). Early next morning we set out over the sea, our pilots anxious about the threatening weather."

Smith and his party landed at Pamanzi Island, where Hunt's schooner, Nduwaro, lay, at 07h00 the next morning. Although he was desperate to see the fish, political cordialities first had to be addressed and Smith was taken to meet the Governor, Monsieur Pierre Coudert. Eventually Smith saw the fish and identified it as a coelacanth. He worked desperately to gather all the available information as inclement weather was closing in and the pilots were anxious to be on their way back to South Africa. They flew in blind torrential rain all the way south and were surprised on their arrival in Durban to find that the whole country had been following the adventure by radio. Too keyed up to sleep the previous few days, Smith was utterly exhausted, yet consented to a late, live radio broadcast that night. The nation was moved to hear him admit that upon sight of the fish he unashamedly wept.

Smith named this fish Malania anjouanae after Dr. D.F. Malan and the island where it was caught. He initially thought that this was a new genus and species due to the lack of the first dorsal fin. However, it was subsequently learnt that the fish had undergone an injury when it was young and that it was after all the same species as the specimen from East London - Latimeria chalumnae. He was disappointed that it turned out to be a male as he had hoped it would be a female with young so that he could study their reproductive habits.

Subsequent to this second discovery, the French banned scientists of other countries from collecting coelacanth specimens in the Comoros for the next fifteen years.

French scientists produced very detailed anatomical studies of coelacanths, based on further specimens caught in the Comoros over that period. After the publication of his work on the second coelacanth specimen, J.L.B Smith expressed no further interest in coelacanth research, feeling that he had spent enough time concentrating on just one species, and continued his extensive studies of other African marine fishes.

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