From Fossil to Living Legend: The 1938 Coelacanth Discovery in East London
In 1938, East London Museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer found a heavy blue coelacanth in a trawler’s discard, a fish science had believed extinct for tens of millions of years. Ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith confirmed its identity as Latimeria chalumnae, publishing the finding in Nature and showing that absence of evidence in the fossil record does not prove extinction. The discovery sparked shifts in how scientists view ‘living fossils’ and evolution, and later work revealed ongoing genomic change despite the fish’s ancient lineage.
