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The woman who found a ‘living fossil’
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was a young curator at a museum in South Africa, and she was keen to collect specimens for the museum’s collection. At Christmas in 1938 she was called down to the town harbour by a local fisherman where she found a beautiful blue fish with limb-like fins. This turned out to be a Coelacanth, a fish last seen as a 70 million year old fossil. A colleague of Marjorie’s from the East London Museum, Kevin Cole, and evolutionary biologist Professor Axel Meyer from the University of Konstanz, tell the story of her incredible discovery.
(Photo credit: The East London Museum)
