It was the morning of 22 December 1938 and the phone was ringing at the newly established museum in East London, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. The call was for Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young curator, then busy reconstructing a fossil dinosaur. Latimer had asked the local trawlermen to alert her to anything unusual in their catches to add to the museum’s collection. Captain Hendrik Goosen, master of the 115-foot trawler Nerine, had been trawling at forty fathoms where the Chalumna River opens onto the Indian Ocean. He thought he had something for her. He just wasn’t sure what.
Latimer headed for the docks. On board, she waded through the sharks and starfish, the seaweed and sponges. Then she saw it. “I picked away the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen,” she remembered. “It was five foot long, a pale, mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots; it had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over. It was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy-dog tail. It was such a beautiful fish – more like a big china ornament.”
But Latimer didn’t know what it was either. She rang the nearest expert she could find, James LB Smith at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, around a hundred miles away. There was no answer. The next day she wrote to him, with a description of what she called a “most queer-looking specimen” and a sketch. Still, there no reply. Unbeknownst to Latimer, Smith was away on holiday in Knysna, 350 miles up the coast.
Latimer was stuck. The museum was disinterested in her find. “You’re making such a fuss about it, but it’s nothing but a rock cod,” its chairman told her. Latimer and a colleague wheeled the specimen across town to the two local refrigeration facilities large enough to take it, one of them the town morgue. Neither would help.
She turned in desperation to a local taxidermist. Together they swaddled the fish in formaldehyde-soaked newspaper and a bedsheet from Latimer’s mother. But in the summer heat, it began to decompose, its body seeping oils at an alarming rate. On the 27th, Latimer took the decision to have it skinned and mounted.
Smith didn’t receive her letter until 3 January. Looking at Latimer’s drawing, he immediately thought she must have found a coelacanth, thought to have been extinct for some 70 million years. He was certain, but plagued with doubt. “What I suspected was so utterly preposterous that my common sense kept up a steady fire of scorn for my idiocy,” he later wrote.
Smith rang Latimer and asked if the gills and viscera had been kept. They had not. Latimer went after the municipal rubbish carts, but the waste had been dumped in the sea.
Still Smith hedged and hesitated, “tortured by doubts and fears” he was about to make a terrible fool of himself. He did not, in fact, reach East London until 16th February. But the moment he saw the specimen, he was convinced. “The first sight hit me like a white-hot blast,” he recalled. “I stood as if stricken to stone.”
Smith announced the discovery in Nature on 18 March 1939 with an article that began by quoting Pliny the Elder: “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi”, there is always something new out of Africa. Although, of course, this was actually something very old.
He named it Latimeria chalumnae, in honour of Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and the river that delivered up its ancient wonder.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the December 2022 issue of History Today.
Like this? You can read more of Mathew’s History Today Months Past pieces here.
Mathew Lyons 
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