Coelacanth
Year of Discovery: 1938
What Is It? A living fish species thought to be extinct for 80 million years.
Who Discovered It? J. L. B. Smith
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
The scientific world was shocked in 1938 when a coelacanth was discovered. All scientists believed that this fish had been extinct for 80 million years. No fossil or trace of it had been
found in more recent strata. This discovery shattered the belief that the known fossil record represented a complete and accurate record of the arrival and extinction of species on this planet. It
confirmed that the deep oceans hold biological mysteries still untapped and unimagined.
Equally important, the coelacanth is a “living fossil.” Unchanged for over 400 million
years, this fish is a close relative of the fish that, hundreds of millions of years ago, was the
first creature to crawl out of the sea onto land—the first amphibian, the first land creature.
Thus, the coelacanth is one of our earliest ancestors. This discovery has been called the
most important zoological find of the twentieth century, as amazing as stumbling upon a
living dinosaur.
How Was It Discovered?
In the late 1930s, 32-year-old Margorie Courtenay-Latimer was the curator of a tiny
museum in the port town of East London on the Indian Ocean side of South Africa. Local
fishing boat captain Hendrick Gossen always called her when he returned to port with unusual or interesting fish that she might want for her collection. Usually these finds turned
out to be nothing important.
On December 23, 1938, just before Margorie closed the museum for her Christmas holiday, she got a call from Gossen. She almost didn’t go. She wanted to go home to wrap presents.
However, she decided to swing quickly by the piers on her way. She climbed onto
Gossen’s boat and noticed a blue fin protruding from beneath a pile of rays and sharks
heaped upon the deck. She had never seen such an iridescent blue on a fish fin before and
she literally gasped.
Pushing the overlaying fish aside revealed what she described as “the most beautiful
fish I ever saw.” It was five feet long, pale mauve-blue with iridescent markings. She had no
idea what the fish was, but knew it was unlike anything previously caught in local waters.
Besides the unique coloring, this fish’s fin 2F?B??BGF6?F?6?V?WF???'WBF?f?W6????&W0???F?R6?FW2?b?G2&?G?2?bF?W?6?V?B&RW6VBF?7W?'BF?Rf?6??B???r?BF?7&v??s`??