Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator of the East London Museum, examined a strange blue fish landed near the Chalumna River mouth in December 1938. She could not place it, made a sketch and wrote to the ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith, who identified it as a coelacanth and named it Latimeria chalumnae in her honour. No further specimen was found until 1952, in the Comoros.
The fish has proved genuinely unusual. It bears an intracranial joint that lets the front of the skull hinge, a notochord persisting as a fluid-filled tube in place of a vertebral column, and paired lobed fins moved in an alternating pattern. Females give birth to live young after a very long gestation.
The common description of the coelacanth as a living fossil is misleading. Latimeria is not the Cretaceous animal returned unchanged; it is a modern genus in an ancient lineage, and genome work has shown its protein-coding genes evolving slowly but not standing still.