In the late 1930s, 32-year old Margorie Courtenay-Latimer was the curator of a tiny museum in the port town of East London on the Indian Ocean side of South Africa. Local fishing boat captain Hendrick Gossen always called her when he re turned to port with unusual or interesting fish that she might want for her collection. Usually these finds turned out to be nothing important.
On December 23, 1938, just be fore Margorie closed the museum for her Christmas holiday, she got a call from Gossen. She almost didn't go. She wanted to go home to wrap presents.
However, she decided to swing quickly by the piers on her way. She climbed onto Gossen's boat and noticed a blue fin protruding from beneath a pile of rays and sharks heaped upon the deck. She had never seen such an iridescent blue on a fish fin before and she literally gasped.
Pushing the overlaying fish aside revealed what she described as “the most beautiful fish I ever saw.” It was five feet long, pale mauve-blue with iridescent markings. She had no idea what the fish was, but knew it was unlike anything previously caught in local waters.Besides the unique coloring, this fish's fins did not attach to a skeleton, but to fleshy lobes on the sides of its body as if they could be used to support the fish and allow it to crawl.
Back in her small museum office with the precious fish, she thumbed through reference books and found a picture that led her to a seemingly impossible conclusion. It looked exactly like a prehistoric fish that had been extinct for 80 million years.
She mailed a detailed description of the fish to professor J. L. B. Smith, a chemistry and biology teacher at Rhodes University, 50 miles south of East London. Unfortunately, Smith had al ready left for Christmas vacation and did not read her message until January 3, 1939. He immediately wired back, “IMPORTANT! PRESERVE SKELETON, ORGANS, AND GILLS OF FISH DESCRIBED!”
By this time, however, the fish's innards (including gills) had been thrown away and the fish had been mounted for museum display. Smith reached Margorie's museum on February 16 and immediately confirmed Margorie's tenta tive ident fica tion. The fish was a coelacanth (SEE-la-kanth), a fish be lieved to be extinct for over 80 million years.
The find was important not only because coelacanths had been thought extinct for such a long time, but also because this recent specimen showed that they had re mained unchanged for over 400 million years!
But Smith needed a second, complete specimen to be sure. He posted a £100 (British) reward for a complete specimen. Yet none were found. It was a tortuously long 14 years before, on Decem ber 21, 1952, fishing captain Eric Hunt was handed a complete coelacanth by native fishermen on the island of Comoro, between Zanzibar and Africa.
Hunt carried this second complete coelacanth to Smith and the discovery was confirmed. Smith published the discovery in his 1956 book on Indian Ocean marine species and rattled the imagination of the world. If an 80-million-year-old creature could lurk undetected in oceans, what else swam, hidden, through the depths? World interest in marine science skyrocketed.
Since 1956, over 200 coelacanths have been caught in the same general area. But it was the vigilant observation of Margorie Courtenay-Latimer and the knowledge of J. L. B. Smith that kept this monumental discovery from being just another fish dinner.
