Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer was the South African museum official who in 1938 brought to the attention of the world the existence of the coelacanth, a fish thought to have been extinct for sixty-five million years.
Background
Courtenay-Latimer was born in East London, South Africa, the daughter of a stationmaster for South African Railways. She was born two months prematurely and throughout her childhood she was a sickly child, nearly dying on one occasion due to a diphtheria infection.
Career
She busily worked on collecting rocks, feathers, shells, and the like for her museum, and made her desire to see unusual specimens known to fishermen. On 22 December 1938, she received a telephone call that such a fish had been brought in. She went to the docks to inspect the catch of Captain Hendrik Goosen.
"I picked away at the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen," she said.
"lieutenant was five feet (150 cm) long, a pale mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots. lieutenant had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over.
lieutenant was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy dog tail."
She hauled the fish to her museum in a taxi and tried to find it in her books without success. Eager to preserve the fish and, having no facilities at the museum, Courtenay-Latimer took it to the morgue, which refused to assist her.
Courtenay-Latimer reluctantly sent it to a taxidermist to skin and gut lieutenant
When Smith finally arrived on 16 February 1939, he instantly recognized the fish as a coelacanth. "There was not a shadow of a doubt", he said. "lieutenant could have been one of those creatures of 200 million years ago come alive again".
Smith would give it the scientific name Latimeria chalumnae after his friend and the Chalumna River, where it was foundation
lieutenant would be fourteen more years before another was brought in.
Views
Quotations:
"There was not a shadow of a doubt".