The Coelacanth: The Fish That Rose From 66 Million Years of Extinction
On a December morning in 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator of the small museum in the South African port of East London, went down to the docks to pick through a trawler's catch, as she often did. Beneath a heap of sharks and rays, a flash of blue caught her eye. What she hauled out was a heavy, steel-blue fish roughly a metre and a half long, sheathed in hard scales and balanced on thick, fleshy fins that moved more like limbs than anything belonging to a fish. She had never seen its like, yet it struck her as somehow ancient.
Unable to name it, she sketched it and mailed the drawing to J.L.B. Smith, a chemistry lecturer and largely self-taught fish expert at Rhodes University. Days passed with no reply while the specimen spoiled in the summer heat; by the time she had it mounted, its internal organs were gone. Then Smith's answer arrived, and it was electric. He recognised the unmistakable outline of a coelacanth, a lineage known only from fossils and thought to have died out around 66 million years ago, at the close of the age of dinosaurs. Reaching East London in February 1939, Smith confirmed the find and named the animal Latimeria chalumnae, the genus for its discoverer, the species for the nearby Chalumna River.
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