The Man Who Swims With Coelacanths

By Brandon Keim May 26, 2011 | 4:39 pm | Categories: Animals


More than seven decades later, the words have the same urgency as when they rolled off Marjorie Courtinay-Latimer’s telegraph machine and into history:

MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS = FISH DESCRIBED.

Courtinay-Latimer was the young curator of a natural history museum on South Africa’s east coast. The message came from J.L.B. Smith, an icthyologist to whom she’d turned when, shortly before Christmas in 1938, local fishermen brought her a fish unlike any they’d ever seen.

Caught at a depth of 240 feet, it was five feet long, covered in bony scales and had fins reminiscent of legs. Courtinay-Latimer immediately sent a sketch to Smith, who thought it looked like a coelacanth. There was just one catch: Coelacanths were extinct, and had been for 70 million years.


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