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 is not a ray-finned fish at all. Latimeria belongs to the Sarcopterygii, the lobe-finned lineage that also contains lungfishes and the tetrapods, which is why its discovery mattered beyond novelty. 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.