The Coelacanth: The Fish That Rose From 66 Million Years of Extinction

2026-06-13 · Mysterious Creatures · 8 min read

On the morning of December 22, 1938, the trawler Nerine came into the harbour at East London, on South Africa's southeast coast, after dragging its nets near the mouth of the Chalumna River. Its captain, Hendrik Goosen, telephoned a friend to ask whether she wanted to pick through the catch, as he sometimes did. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the thirty-year-old curator of the town's small museum, almost did not go; it was three days before Christmas and she had a display to finish. She went anyway. Beneath a heap of sharks and rays, a flash of blue caught her eye - the most beautiful fish, she would later say, that she had ever seen.

What she worked free was a heavy, steel-blue fish about a metre and a half long and some fifty-odd kilograms, sheathed in hard armoured scales and balanced on thick, fleshy fins that moved more like limbs than anything she associated with a fish. She had never seen its like, yet it struck her as somehow ancient, as if it had swum out of deep time. She wanted it for the museum, and the struggle to get it there has become part of the legend: a reluctant taxi driver, unwilling to let a large and increasingly pungent fish into his cab, was talked into carrying it in the boot, wrapped in a sack.

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