On 21 December 1938, a 31-year-old museum curator saved a fish no one could name. It turned out to be a coelacanth; a fish thought to have vanished some 65 million years ago.
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was born in East London on 24 February 1907, and in 1936 she became curator of the East London Museum; a young woman running a small city museum at a time when the natural sciences were still overwhelmingly a man’s world.
Two years later, in December 1938, she was sorting through the catch of a fishing trawler that had been working the Chalumna River mouth, around 70 metres deep, when she noticed a fin unlike anything in her museum’s collection. The fish was strange; steel-blue, heavy-scaled, with fins on fleshy stalks. No one could name it. Courtenay-Latimer saved the specimen from being discarded, had it transported to the museum, and alerted the ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith.
Smith identified it in 1939: not a new species of an old kind, but a coelacanth; a group of fishes whose fossil record seemed to end around 65 million years ago, thought to have died out with the dinosaurs. It was, and is, regarded as one of the most significant zoological discoveries of the 20th century: a living fossil, swimming off South Africa’s coast. Smith named the species Latimeria chalumnae — for the woman who saved it, and the river where it was caught.
The specimen still lives at the East London Museum today. But its real legacy is the label: one of the most famous specimen labels in the world, carrying a woman’s name.
For Women’s Month, Courtenay-Latimer’s story is the perfect place to start with Her Name on the Label: a label is only a label because someone noticed, saved, and named. She did all three, and a fish thought lost to deep time is now part of South Africa’s scientific identity.
Visit the East London Museum to see the coelacanth for yourself, and when you find it, take a photo of the label and post it on social media with #HerNameOnTheLabel.
Don’t stop there: when you find a specimen collected by a woman, photograph the label and post it with #HerNameOnTheLabel.