How Was the Coelacanth Rediscovered? The 1938 Find

The strange fish on the trawler Nerine

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was 31 and had run the small East London Museum since 1931. She had asked local fishermen to tell her about any unusual animals, and Captain Hendrik Goosen of the trawler Nerine often called her when he docked. On 22 December 1938, after a trawl off the mouth of the Chalumna River, he set aside a fish that none of his crew had seen before.

Courtenay-Latimer later described it as about 1.5 m (5 ft) long, pale mauve-blue with faint white flecks, covered in hard scales, with four limb-like fins and an odd, puppy-like tail. She could not find it in any of her books. She took it back to the museum in a taxi and made a sketch, which she posted to J. L. B. Smith, a chemistry lecturer at Rhodes University in Grahamstown (now Makhanda) and a keen amateur ichthyologist, or fish scientist.

Keeping the fish was the next problem. It was the height of the South African summer, and neither the town morgue nor the cold store would take it. Smith was away on holiday, and as the fish began to decay, Courtenay-Latimer had a taxidermist skin and mount it. The internal organs, including the gills and most of the skeleton, were thrown away.

How J. L. B. Smith identified the coelacanth

Smith received the letter and sketch early in January 1939 and was astonished. The fleshy fins, the shape of the tail and the heavy scales matched coelacanths he knew only from fossils. He telegraphed the museum asking for the skeleton and gills to be saved, but it was already too late.

On 16 February 1939 Smith finally saw the mounted fish for himself and confirmed his suspicion. He named it Latimeria chalumnae, after Courtenay-Latimer and the Chalumna River, and announced the find in the journal Nature in March 1939 under the title “A living fish of Mesozoic type”. The find made headlines around the world, and the fish soon became known as a “living fossil”.

Without the soft parts, some scientists still doubted whether the stuffed fish was really a coelacanth. Smith knew that only a second, complete specimen could settle the question.

The 14-year search for a second coelacanth

Smith printed leaflets with a picture of the fish and offered a reward of 100 pounds, a fortune for a fisherman at the time, and had them distributed along the coast of East Africa. The Second World War interrupted the search, and years passed with no result. Smith did not know that the 1938 fish had been caught far south of the species’ main home.

In December 1952, a fisherman on Anjouan in the Comoros caught a coelacanth on a line. The trader and sea captain Eric Hunt, who had one of Smith’s leaflets, made sure the fish was preserved and cabled Smith. The South African prime minister, Daniel François Malan, lent Smith a military Dakota aircraft to fetch it. This specimen was missing its first dorsal fin because of an old injury, and Smith at first placed it in a new genus, Malania, named after the prime minister. It was later recognized as the same species as the 1938 fish.

The Comorians were puzzled by the excitement. Their fishermen had long known the coelacanth, which they called gombessa, as a rare and oily fish that was not good to eat. Smith told the story of the hunt in his 1956 book Old Fourlegs.

What happened after 1952?

Once scientists knew where to look, more specimens followed. Between 1938 and 1975 about 84 coelacanths were caught and recorded, almost all of them in the Comoros. In 1975, scientists at the American Museum of Natural History dissected a female and found five large embryos, proving that coelacanths give birth to live young.

In the late 1980s, a team led by the German biologist Hans Fricke used a small submersible to film coelacanths alive in their deep caves off Grande Comore for the first time. Coelacanths were also recorded off Mozambique, Madagascar and Kenya, and in 2000 deep divers found them in underwater canyons at Sodwana Bay in South Africa. Since 2003, dozens more have been caught off Tanzania. What scientists have since learned about the fish’s age is covered in how long do coelacanths live?

The Indonesian coelacanth, found in 1997

The second living species was found almost by chance. In September 1997, the American marine biologist Mark Erdmann and his wife, Arnaz Mehta, were on their honeymoon in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, when they saw an unusual brown fish arrive at a market in Manado. They took photographs, and Erdmann recognized it as a coelacanth.

Erdmann asked local fishermen to watch for another, and on 30 July 1998 one was caught alive. It was about 1.2 m (4 ft) long, weighed 29 kg (64 lb), and lived for about six hours, long enough for scientists to record its colors and fin movements. DNA tests showed it differed from the African fish, and in 1999 it was described as a new species, Latimeria menadoensis, the Indonesian coelacanth. Local fishermen call it raja laut, “king of the sea”.

Where can you see the famous specimens?

The original 1938 coelacanth is still on display at the East London Museum in South Africa, and the 1952 specimen collected by Smith is kept at the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity in Makhanda. Preserved coelacanths can also be seen in major natural history museums in Europe and North America.

To learn more about the species itself, see the coelacanth profile, and for the debate over its famous nickname, read why is the coelacanth a living fossil?