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On December 21st, 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young museum curator in East London, South Africa, received a call from one Captain Goosen, the skipper of a local fishing trawler. He had just returned from a trip up the coast to the mouth of the Chalumna River, he said, and had netted an unusual fish that he thought might be interesting to the museum.
It was nearly Christmas, and she was busy with a number of other tasks, but Courtenay-Latimer finally decided the captain’s catch was worth a quick look. She took a taxi to the docks, clambered aboard the trawler and there, lying on the deck, she found what she later described as ‘the most beautiful fish I ever saw’. It was around five foot long, covered in overlapping, bony scales, and had four limb-like fins and a tapering, solid tail with a tuft at the end of it. Intrigued, Courtenay-Latimer bundled the huge, smelly carcass into a taxi and brought it back to the museum.
Once there, she was faced with the difficult task of preserving the fish. She had no cold storage facilities in which to keep it, and after a futile call to the local mortuary, she turned to the local taxidermist for help. The outer fish was eventually preserved using formalin. Curiously excited by her discovery, the young curator sent a letter containing a sketch of the fish to Professor J L B Smith, a chemistry letter at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and amateur ichthyologist. He was at the time enjoying a Christmas break at his holiday home, and her letter didn’t reach him for almost thirteen days. While Courtenay-Latimer waited impatiently for a response, the internal organs of the fish began to rot and had to be thrown away. When Dr Smith finally received the letter and set eyes on the picture Marjorie had drawn of the fish, he recounted that ‘I stared and stared, at first in puzzlement. I did not know any fish of our own, or indeed of any seas, like that; it looked more like a lizard.
And then a bomb seemed to burst in my brain, and beyond that sketch and the paper of the letter, I was looking at a series of fishy creatures that flashed up as on a screen, fishes no longer here, fishes that lived in dim past ages gone, and of which only fragmentary remains in rocks are known’. Two weeks later, Dr Smith arrived at the East London museum to see the mounted fish specimen with his own eyes, and ‘the sight hit me like a white-hot blast’. It was indeed a coelacanth, and he christened it Latimeria Chalumnae in honour of its discoverer.
For what Captain Goosen had trawled up by accident off the coast of East London was none other than a coelacanth, a fish that was thought to have been extinct for seventy million years. It was the greatest zoological discovery of the century, and Smith himself likened it to ‘coming across a herd of dinosaurs grazing in some remote forest clearing’. Of all the fossil fish that could have mysteriously been resurrected in the modern age, the coelacanth was one of the most interesting. Its fleshy, limb-like fins, which led Smith to christen it ‘old fourlegs’, were possibly a precursor to the organisms that eventually left the water and began to walk on land – in other words, the ancestors of mammals and mankind. The coelacanth represented, literally, the first steps in the history of evolution. When the fish was put on display in the East London Museum (where it remains to this day), people queued around the block to see it. The fish was dubbed ‘the missing link’ by the press, and Smith received angry letters from hard-line, evolution-denying South African Calvinists who had yet to accept the idea that the world was millions of years old. But without the soft parts of the fish, Smith was unable to rest easily with his historic discovery. He began an obsessive search for another specimen of the fish that was to consume his mind for the rest of his life.
For fourteen long years he and his wife Margaret travelled the coast of Africa, scouring every tiny fishing village from South Africa in the south to Mogadishu in the north, in a quest to find another coelacanth. Thousands of leaflets were printed with pictures of the fish and text in several languages, promising lavish rewards for anyone who turned in a fresh specimen. No-one replied. | 
