“Had I never gone to Bird Island; had I never met Dr. JLB Smith […]; and had I not gone to the wharf to wish the men a Happy Christmas, there never would have been a coelacanth discovery in South Africa, on 22 December 1938.” This is how Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer summed up the circumstances that led to a discovery which captured the world’s imagination. Her summary is missing one crucial element though, her own tenacity.
On December 22, 1938, Courtenay-Latimer interrupted her work at the Museum of East London, South Africa, in response to a call from the docks, and made the discovery of a lifetime. But she only got the call at all because of a childhood obsession with an island.
Bird Island, off the southern coast of Africa, had captivated Courtenay-Latimer’s imagination since her childhood. Visiting her grandmother in a coastal town, she’d been mesmerised by the rays from the island’s lighthouse sweeping across the bay. When, in her twenties, she became curator of the East London Museum – a rare appointment for a woman – her interest in the island was rekindled, this time as a source of animals to display. She badgered a government official to let her go there to collect specimens. The official eventually acquiesced, on the condition that Courtenay-Latimer be accompanied by ‘one other older lady’. The determined curator convinced her mother to join her – and her father to grant them permission – and set off. While she was out collecting fish and seabirds near the Island, she met Captain Goosen. Goosen – who ran a fishing trawler – took an interest in Courtenay-Latimer’s collections. When the curator’s stay on the island ended, he helped transport the specimens back to the mainland. Afterwards, he frequently brought her any interesting catches his crew made. It was a call from Goosen’s trawler that got Courtenay-Latimer to the dock on that fateful December morning.
A truly living fossil
When the phone rang, Courtenay-Latimer briefly considered declining. It was a hot day, and she had no cold storage to keep any fish Goosen may have for her. In the end, she decided to take the opportunity to wish the fishermen a Merry Christmas. To her surprise, buried under a pile of fish on the deck, she found a Christmas present of her own. “I saw a blue fin, and pushing off the fish, the most beautiful fish I had ever seen was revealed”, she later wrote. The fish that caught Courtenay-Latimer’s eye was 5-foot-long (1.52m) and a pale violet-blue with iridescent silver markings. She’d have to fight hot weather and cold reactions to preserve her stunning find.
In the height of South African summer, most people Courtenay-Latimer appealed to on that day were concerned not with sight, but with the smell. To get her specimen to the museum, she over-ruled a cry of “No stinking fish in my taxi!”. This sentiment was later echoed by the people in charge of the local mortuary, when she asked to use their cold storage. In her re-telling of the story 40 years later, Courtenay-Latimer’s exasperation comes through: “It was NOT stinking; it was fresh and beautiful”, she wrote. She was painfully aware that it soon would be stinking with rot, though: “it was a blazing day and I had to work fast.”
As soon as she got the fish back to her museum, Courtenay-Latimer searched through her books to see what it might be, but she could find nothing like it. The gentlemen on the museum’s board of trustees were not interested, but Courtenay-Latimer would not let the matter slide. She had photos taken. She made sketches of the fish and its main features, and sent them to JLB Smith, a South-African scientist and expert in fishes. She expected a reply within a day or two, but the fish wouldn’t stay fresh that long. If Smith was to have anything other than a rotten, stinking carcass to look at, Courtenay-Latimer would have to preserve her specimen.
With cold storage out of the picture, Courtenay-Latimer turned to a local taxidermist for help. When Smith’s reply finally came – over a week later, on 3 January 1939 – his appeal that it was “Most important [to] preserve [the] skeleton and gills [of the] fish described” came too late. To compound the loss, Courtenay-Latimer discovered that the photographer’s film had been damaged. So all that was left of the fish was its mounted skin, her sketches, and the notes that she and the taxidermist had taken. Nevertheless, her detailed observations were enough for Smith to confirm that this was a jaw-dropping find.
The fish’s fleshy fins, which stuck out of its body almost like arms and legs, were typical of a group of fish called coelacanths. Other details of Courtenay-Latimer’s description made Smith confident in this ID. But the only coelacanths anyone had ever seen were fossils. Scientists thought coelacanths had been extinct for 65 million years!
Smith published a description of the fish in the renowned scientific journal Nature, effectively stating that coelacanths were not extinct after all. He named the species Latimeria in Courtenay-Latimer’ honour. With their stocky, limb-like fins, coelacanths seemed like a snapshot of our own evolution in action. Looking at a coelacanth, it’s easy to think of a fish like this growing sturdier and sturdier limbs and moving from water to dry land. The idea that such ‘primitive’ fish were still living in our oceans captured people’s imagination. For a while, the coelacanth became so well known that the word was even used as an insult.
More fish in the sea
In the meantime, a few more coelacanths were dragged up from steep rocky slopes of volcanic islands between mainland Africa and Madagascar. And in 1999 a new species of coelacanth was found around Sulawesi, Indonesia. While these catches confirmed that coelacanths are not extinct, their exact place in the evolutionary tree is still a subject of debate. Some scientists place these fleshy-finned fish close to the branching point between fish and amphibians, but others claim that they are closer to the fish side of the tree.
Almost 80 years since Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer rediscovered the species, coelacanths remain a rare sight. They live in the ‘twilight zone’, the swath of ocean that sunlight barely reaches. The African species – the one that bears Courtenay-Latimer’s name – seems to gather in underwater caves during the day, venturing out at night to feed on cuttlefish, squid and fish. We know very little about the Indonesian species. Coelacanths’ reclusive habits and low numbers could explain why they went un-noticed by scientists for so long. And according to Smith, they might have remained undiscovered for longer, if it wasn’t for Courtenay-Latimer. As he wrote in the paper describing the species: “It was the energy and determination of Miss Latimer which saved so much, and scientific workers have good cause to be grateful.”
References
- Courtenay-Latimer, M. ‘My story of the first Coelacanth’. Occ. Pap. Calif. Acad. Sci. 134, 6-10 (1979).
- Smith, JLB. ‘A living fish of Mesozoic type’. Nature 143, 455-456 (1939)
- Smith, JLB. ‘The living coelacanthid fish from South Africa’. Nature 143, 748-750 (1939).
- Lagios, MD & McCosker, JE. ‘Biology and Physiology of the Living Coelacanth – Introduction’. Occ. Pap. Calif. Acad. Sci. 134, 1-6 (1979).
- Forey, PL. ‘Golden jubilee for the coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae’. Nature 336, 727-732 (1988).
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “The Coelacanth: More Living than Fossil.” http://vertebrates.si.edu/fishes/coelacanth/coelacanth_wider.html (accessed January 2018).
- Erin Eastwood. “The coelacanth: A living fossil of a fish” TEDEd. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-coelacanth-a-living-fossil-of-a-fish-erin-eastwood (accessed January 2018).
About the author
Once upon a time, Sonia Furtado Neves was a two-year-old staring transfixed at a documentary on polar bears for the better part of an hour. Now, she gets a thrill from helping people see how weird and wonderful life is. A bilingual biologist turned science communicator, Sonia worked in Lisbon Zoo’s education department and then in the communications department at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). She is currently communications officer at the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds (SPEA). Although she can’t draw to save her life, Sonia once made Edvard Munch’s The Scream out of pancakes.
