December 23, 1938

Latimeria

A living coelacanth is caught and brought to an East London museum curator

The fish was still alive when the trawl net brought it up. Then the Christmas post delayed the one letter that could identify it by ten days, while the specimen decomposed.

The 22nd, per Smith's own announcement

The listed date of 23 December is not supported. J. L. B. Smith's original 1939 announcement in Nature explicitly gives 22 December 1938 as the capture date.

A trawl net brought up a living, unfamiliar fish at a depth of about 40 fathoms several miles west of East London, South Africa. It died shortly after capture.

Captain Hendrik Goosen and his crew did not recognize its scientific importance, but alerted the local museum because of its unusual appearance.

A sketch posted into the Christmas mail

The catch went to Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator of the East London Museum, who found a roughly 1.5-metre fish with vivid blue scales and fleshy fins. She made a sketch and sent it with descriptive notes to the ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith.

The letter took ten days to reach him. The museum had no adequate preserving equipment, so the decomposing internal body was discarded and a local taxidermist mounted what remained.

Smith did not inspect and conclusively identify the mounted specimen in person until February 1939.

Which family, and whose discovery

Smith named the species for the curator and the reported capture locality: Latimeria chalumnae. Modern Latimeria belongs to the family Latimeriidae — not the extinct family Coelacanthidae under which the article was filed.

Coelacanths had been inferred absent from the fossil record for roughly 70–80 million years, a disappearance museum sources place near the end of the Cretaceous rather than in the Jurassic.

The find was new to Western science, not to everyone: Comorian fishers already knew the fish as gombessa.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Date corrected

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date corrected. The research places this at 1938-12-22.

What the sources leave uncertain

The listed December 23 date is not supported by Smith's original 1939 announcement, which explicitly gives December 22.
Accounts describe the locality variously as near the Chalumna River mouth and as several miles west of East London. Smith's original report gives the latter wording and about 40 fathoms of depth.
The catch and Courtenay-Latimer's recognition occurred on December 22; Smith did not inspect and conclusively identify the mounted specimen in person until February 1939.