A Fish Presumed Extinct Since The Dinosaurs Just Rewrote Its Own Obituary

When Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer looked through a fishing trawler’s catch off the coast of South Africa in December 1938, one fish stood out immediately, a large blue creature, about 1.5 metres long, with heavy armour-like scales and fins unlike any she had seen before.

The museum curator sought expert opinion, sending a description and sketches to South African ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith. Weeks later, after examining the preserved specimen, Smith reached a startling conclusion: the fish belonged to a group scientists knew only from fossils, one believed to have vanished from the record around 66 million years ago alongside the dinosaurs.

Smith named the species Latimeria chalumnae, honouring both Courtenay-Latimer and the Chalumna River near where it was caught, according to the Natural History Museum. The discovery stunned the scientific community, a lineage presumed extinct for tens of millions of years had, in fact, been surviving quietly in the depths of the Indian Ocean.

Coelacanths remained hidden for so long largely because of their habitat. They live hundreds of metres below the surface, sheltering inside underwater caves and rocky formations during the day and emerging at night to hunt squid, cuttlefish and smaller fish, far beyond where people typically observe marine life. In the Comoros Islands, though, local fishermen already knew the species by the name ‘gombessa’.

The fish belongs to a group known as lobe-finned fishes, whose fins are attached to muscular lobes rather than the thin rays of most modern fish. That anatomy briefly fuelled speculation that the coelacanth might be a missing link between sea life and the first land vertebrates, though later genetic research showed lungfish are the closer relatives; the coelacanth still carries a flexible notochord instead of a bony spine, along with a rare skull joint that allows its mouth to open unusually wide.

The 1938 find was not the last. A second coelacanth specimen was documented in the Comoros Islands in 1952, and in 1997 another turned up at a market in Indonesia. Genetic analysis showed it belonged to a separate species, Latimeria menadoensis, confirming that the coelacanth lineage was more diverse than scientists had originally believed.

Wikimedia Commons/by Nkansah Rexford