Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was a museum curator at the East London Museum in South Africa. When she started her position in 1931, the modest museum boasted little more than six stuffed birds infested with beetles and a few old display cases. Two days later, she'd burnt the decaying old birds, axed the display cases, and started repopulating the museum with exciting new exhibits including her personal stone tool collection.

Courtenay-Latimer’s reputation quickly grew beyond the bounds of the small East London Museum. She studied exhibiting techniques at Cape Town’s South African Museum, met the famed ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith, and spent three months studying wildlife on Bird Island, a dream since childhood. It was on this study trip in 1937 that she met Captain Hendrik Goosen of the fishing boat Nernie. Goosen offered to collect any unusual specimens he came across and send them to her at the museum.

On December 22, 1938, Courtenay-Latimer was working to finish a dinosaur reconstruction before Christmas when the phone rang. It was Goosen with a fresh haul of unusual sea creatures. Along with her Xhosa assistant Enoch Thwate, Courtenay-Latimer took a taxi down to the docks and poured through a tub of sharks, fish, and seaweed until she was surprised by a shining blue finned fish. Goosen had not mentioned this creature over the phone, even though it had snapped at him as it trawled up from the depths.

It was, in her own words, "the most beautiful fish I had ever seen." Staring back at Courtenay-Latimer with its tough scales and pronounced fins was the prehistoric Coelacanth in the flesh. A living fossil uncovered once again. She and Thwate loaded the 127 pound fish in the back of a taxi cab, after convincing the driver wouldn't smell too bad.

Courtenay-Latimer knew she needed the help of an ichthyologist to confirm her hunch and reached out to her colleague J.L.B. Smith. Unfortunately, Smith was on Christmas holiday and didn't see her letters until the new year. By then the Coelacanth’s internal organs had disintegrated, a major blow to identification. However, when Smith saw the sketches he believed Courtenay-Latimer was right.

A few weeks later, he confirmed the fish was a Coelacanth in person and had it sent under armed guard to his home in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, to continue examination. His findings were published later that year, and the fish was namedLatimeria chalumnae, in Courtenay-Latimer’s honor.

Smith spent years searching for another living Coelacanth and after the Second World War ended, he traveled across the African continent to find one. Eventually, he identified another of the fish in 1952, on the Comoro Islands off Madagascar. This long search for another Coelacanth is recounted in Smith's book, Old Fourlegs: The Story of the Coelacanth.

Courtenay-Latimer continued her work at the East London Museum, which for a time housed the second discovered Coelacanth after Smith’s identification. Eventually, she retired to a farm at Tsitsikamma, but later returned back to East London once more.

Her influence on the world of science and biology is major—Courtenay-Latimer's immediate realization and preservation of the Coelacanth specimen was the source of the animal's rediscovery in the modern era. Today, the Coelacanth is known as a bit of a pop culture phenomenon, appearing in art, video games, postage stamps, and even Pokémon!

The next time you see this beautiful fish, remember the story of the incredible woman who discovered it. 🐟