A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth

In 1938 Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young South African museum curator, caught sight of a fish among a fisherman’s trawl in the Indian Ocean. It was thought to have been extinct for 70,000,000 years and believed by scientists to be the evolutionary missing link – the first creature to crawl out of the sea 400,000,000 years ago. The museum board members dismissed it as a common lungfish, but when Marjorie contacted Professor J.L.B. Smith, he immediately identified it as the evolutionary Holy Grail – the greatest zoological discovery of the 20th century. But Smith needed a live or frozen specimen to verify the discovery, and thus began a search to which he devoted his life.