Something fishy off South Africa?

Imagine finding an animal that everyone thought to be extinct long ago. Three days before Christmas in 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator of the East London Museum in South Africa, was inspecting the haul from a local trawler, she was always notified of large hauls, but this seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. However, amongst the sharks, starfish and sponges, she noticed a blue fin sticking up. “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 feint 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 bit china ornament - but I didn't know what it was.”

As it turned out, this bizarre find, brought up from 75 meters, and weighing almost 60 kilos, was a living fossil - the now famous Coelacanth. Marjorie realised it was a special find, and informed her friend and honorary curator Dr. James Leonard Brierley Smith, who later confirmed the catch as a Coelacanth, an organism dating back 400 million years. He said to Marjorie in a letter, “To honour you for having got this wonderful thing I have provisionally christened it (to myself at present) Latimeria chalumnae...” the name that it still has today. This book I read* details the whole enthralling story from capture, Dr. Smith’s determination to find a living specimen, to the latest discoveries of the species in Indonesia.