The ‘Extinct’ Fish a South African Curator Found Alive at Her Local Harbour

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On the 22nd of December 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer did something she did regularly — she went to the East London harbour to check the day’s catch. What she found in that pile of sea creatures would overturn 65 million years of scientific certainty.

She nearly walked past it.

The Day Before Christmas That Changed Everything

Marjorie was the curator of a small natural history museum in East London, on South Africa’s Eastern Cape coast. She was young — only 26 — and passionate about collecting unusual specimens for her museum.

On that December morning, she spotted a fish unlike anything she had ever seen. It was roughly 1.5 metres long, pale blue, with unusual lobed fins that looked almost like limbs. It had rough, heavy scales and a strange second tail fin.

She had no idea what it was. But she knew she had never seen anything like it. She sketched it carefully and sent her drawing to Professor J.L.B. Smith, a fish expert at Rhodes University in nearby Grahamstown. His response, when it came, would stop her in her tracks.

The Letter That Shook the Scientific World

Smith told Marjorie she had found a coelacanth — a fish that scientists believed had died out with the dinosaurs, around 65 million years ago.

The coelacanth existed only in the fossil record. No living specimen had ever been documented in modern times. Yet here was one, caught by a local trawlerman, lying in a South African harbour on the eve of Christmas.

Smith later wrote that when he finally saw the fish, his hands shook. He described the experience as the most extraordinary of his scientific life — comparable, he said, to encountering a living dinosaur. The discovery was announced to the world in January 1939, and the response was immediate and global.

South Africa has given the world more remarkable wildlife discoveries than almost any other country, but this one stood entirely apart. This was not a new species. This was an ancient one — alive, swimming, and refusing to be extinct.

A Fish That Defied Time

The coelacanth’s biology makes its survival all the more extraordinary.

It belongs to a lineage that has existed for around 400 million years — predating the dinosaurs, the evolution of land animals, and every large creature that has ever walked, swum, or flown.

Its distinctive lobed fins are thought to be an evolutionary precursor to the limbs of land animals. In a very real sense, the coelacanth is a window into what our earliest ancestors — the first creatures to leave the sea — may have looked like.

The fish moves slowly through deep, cold water, typically between 150 and 700 metres below the surface. It has a unique electrosensory organ in its snout to detect prey in total darkness. It gives birth to live young, rather than laying eggs. And it has barely changed in hundreds of millions of years.

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The Search for a Second Fish

After the 1938 discovery, scientists desperately wanted a fresh second specimen to study. Professor Smith spent 14 years searching, convinced that more coelacanths could be found in the waters around the Comoros Islands, off the east coast of Africa.

In 1952, he was proved right. A second specimen was caught there by a local fisherman.

Smith’s determination to secure it was extraordinary. He contacted South Africa’s Prime Minister directly, and a Royal Air Force Dakota aircraft was made available to fly him to the Comoros to collect the fish in person. When the plane touched down and he saw the specimen, Smith wept.

Since then, populations of coelacanths have been documented off the Comoros, Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya, and along South Africa’s own KwaZulu-Natal coast — particularly near the iSimangaliso Wetland Park. A second species was later discovered in Indonesian waters.

The fish is critically endangered today. But it is alive. And South Africa is where the world first learned it still existed.

What You Can Still See Today

If you want to come close to this story, start in East London. The East London Museum still holds Marjorie’s original 1938 specimen — preserved, mounted, and on display. It is one of the most significant natural history exhibits in Africa.

For those planning a wider South African adventure, the KwaZulu-Natal coast — where living coelacanths are occasionally observed by specialist dive teams — is also home to extraordinary marine encounters. Whale sharks, loggerhead turtles, and manta rays share these waters with a fish that has been swimming them for longer than humans have existed.

South Africa’s coastline has always held its secrets close. Cape Point’s dramatic waters have claimed hundreds of ships over four centuries. The cold Atlantic and the warm Indian Ocean meet south of the Cape. And somewhere out there, in the dark deep water off the Eastern Cape, the coelacanth swims on — unchanged, unhurried, and seemingly unaware that it was ever supposed to be gone.

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a 26-year-old curator in a small coastal town, looked at a fish nobody else had paid attention to. And she changed what the world thought it knew about time, extinction, and life itself.

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