A Museum Curator Spots a Fish Thought Extinct for 66 Million Years

On 22 December 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the curator of the local museum in East London, South Africa, inspected the catch brought in by the trawler Nerine, which had been fishing near the mouth of the Chalumna River. Among the ordinary commercial fish, she identified an unusual specimen that did not match any living species documented in local waters. Recognizing its distinct anatomical features, she secured the fish and alerted J. L. B. Smith, an ichthyologist at Rhodes University, sending him sketches and a description of its structure. When Smith received her letter in early January 1939, he suspected a coelacanth at once and replied with an urgent telegram directing her to preserve the skeleton and gills.

The fish was identified as a surviving member of the coelacanth lineage, a group belonging to the lobe-finned fish class Actinistia. First described in 1839 from Permian fossils by Louis Agassiz, coelacanths had long been documented across global marine and freshwater strata dating as far back as the early Devonian, more than 410 million years ago. Because their fossil record abruptly disappeared around 66 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous extinction, the scientific community had assumed the entire lineage was extinct. Its reappearance off the South African coast established the coelacanth as the most prominent example of a Lazarus taxon, an evolutionary line that vanishes from the geological record only to reappear alive in the modern era.