From the moment Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer pulled the blue fish out of the heap, two clocks were running against each other. One belonged to the South African summer, which was already at work on five feet of dead flesh with no ice anywhere to stop it. The other belonged to the one man who could say what the fish was — and he was on holiday, hundreds of kilometers away, with no idea a letter was on its way. The whole story is the gap between those two clocks, and which one ran out first.
The dock
On the morning of December 22, 1938, a telephone call came in to the East London Museum, a small institution on the southeastern coast of South Africa. The trawler Nerine was back in port, and there were fish on board that someone might want to look at before the rest went to the fishmongers. The someone was Courtenay-Latimer, the museum’s curator, then in her early thirties. She had been hired in 1931, at twenty-four, to build a natural history collection more or less from nothing. Among the museum’s holdings by then was a family heirloom of hers, a dodo egg believed to be the only one known in the world; she built out the rest of the collection herself, bird skins and the odd interesting fish, and she had a standing arrangement with the Nerine’s captain, Hendrik Goosen, to set aside anything unusual that came up in his nets.
It was almost Christmas and the museum was busy. She nearly didn’t go. She went.
The catch was the usual deep-water haul, dredged up off the mouth of the Chalumna River — sharks, rays, the common trash of the trawl, piled on the deck. She was about to leave when she saw a flash of blue under the heap. She and a museum hand pulled the other fish off it.
It was about five feet long and heavy, close to fifty-seven kilograms. It was a pale mauve-blue gone iridescent in the light, flecked with whitish spots, and it was covered in scales like armor plate. What stopped her were the fins. They were not the thin fins of an ordinary fish; they sat on thick, scaled, muscular stalks, and they moved like limbs. There was a strange second tail, a small lobe sticking straight out of the middle of the main one.
Years later she described it plainly: the most beautiful fish she had ever seen, with four limb-like fins and a strange puppy-dog tail. She had no idea what it was. She knew only that it was old in some way she couldn’t name, and that it did not belong in any book she had.
Two clocks
She took a cab back to the museum with the fish wrapped in sacking. She tried to find someone who could identify it. The local experts she reached were no help; one suggested it was a rock cod. She sketched it, took notes, and the next day wrote to the one man she trusted to know — J.L.B. Smith, a chemistry lecturer at Rhodes University who studied fish on the side and had become South Africa’s leading ichthyologist by sheer obsession.
“I had the most queer-looking specimen brought to notice yesterday,” her letter began. The fins resembled limbs, she wrote, scaled right up to a fringe of filament. She enclosed her drawing.
The letter went into the post and stalled. Smith was on holiday in Knysna, a few hundred kilometers away, and it sat unopened. It would not reach him until January 3 — eleven days during which the man who held the answer had no idea the question existed.
The other clock did not stop. The South African summer was doing its work. The fish had no refrigeration to go to; the museum had nothing that could hold a five-foot specimen, and the cold-storage and the hospital morgue both turned it away. Within days it had begun to rot. Courtenay-Latimer did the only thing she could to save anything at all: she handed it to a taxidermist named Robert Center to be skinned and mounted, and the soft insides — the organs, the gills, everything a scientist would actually need to describe a new animal — were cut out and thrown away.
By the time the two clocks finally met, one had already won.
January 3
When Smith opened her letter and looked at the drawing, he understood what he was probably looking at, and it was almost too much to believe. The fins, the tail, the scales — they matched a kind of fish known only from fossils, lobe-finned creatures pressed into rock for hundreds of millions of years. The lineage went back more than 360 million years. The last of them in the fossil record vanished around the time the dinosaurs did, roughly 65 million years ago. Nobody had ever found one younger than that. As far as science was concerned, they had been extinct since long before there were primates, since before grass was common, since the age when the great reptiles still ruled.
He wired East London at once. The telegram was blunt: MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS OF FISH DESCRIBED.
It was already too late. The gills were gone. The organs were gone. What was left was a skin and a skull and the curator’s careful notes.
In his letter to her that same day, January 3, he was cautious on paper and frantic underneath it. “From your drawing and description,” he wrote, “the fish resembles forms which have been extinct for many a long year, but I am very anxious to see it before committing myself.”
“A coelacanth for certain”
Smith could not get to East London until February. The waiting nearly unmade him. By early February she had managed to send him some of the scales, and on the seventh he wrote that they “hammered flat most of my doubts. Coelacanth, yes a Coelacanth for certain.” Weeks before that, on January 9, he had already privately settled on a name, in her honor and after the river that delivered it: Latimeria chalumnae.
He reached the museum on February 16, 1939, and saw the mounted fish in the flesh. “Although I had come prepared,” he wrote, “that first sight hit me like a white-hot blast and made me feel shaky and queer, my body tingled.” It is the line for which he is remembered, alongside the one he is supposed to have said aloud — that he would not have been more astonished to meet a dinosaur in the street.
The announcement made headlines around the world. A creature that science had buried 65 million years deep had been hauled up alive in a net, and a young curator with no formal degree in the field had recognized that it mattered and refused to let it be thrown out with the sharks.
Fourteen years for the second fish
There was one large problem. The single specimen was a stuffed skin. No one had the soft anatomy. And Smith now knew the species was out there, somewhere, in water deep enough to have hidden it the whole time.
He spent the next fourteen years looking. He and his wife, Margaret, printed thousands of reward leaflets — a picture of the fish, a description of its peculiar double tail, an offer of £100 — and spread them along the coast of East Africa in English, French, and Portuguese, urging fishermen to look carefully and preserve anything that matched.
On December 20, 1952, a fisherman caught one on a hand line off Anjouan, in the Comoro Islands, far to the north. A trader named Eric Hunt got the fish into formalin and cabled Smith. This time Smith was not going to lose it to delay or heat. He persuaded the South African prime minister, D.F. Malan, to lend him a military aircraft, and an air force Dakota flew him north to collect it. He wept when he saw it.
It turned out the coelacanths had been there all along, in the deep volcanic reefs off the Comoros, where local fishermen pulled them up now and then and found them too oily to eat. The species had never been extinct at all. It had simply been living where the fossil-hunters never thought to look, and where no one with the right book in his head had happened to be standing — until a curator in East London decided, the week before Christmas, to walk down to the docks and check the catch.