First living coelacanth

Traditionally, coelacanths were thought to be a long-extinct, exclusively prehistoric lineage of thick-scaled lobe-finned fishes that were contemporaries of the dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era more than 65 million years ago. On 22 December 1938, however, a large and strange-looking fish with thick armour-like scales, lobe-like fins and a remarkable three-finned tail was captured alive off South Africa that proved to be a hitherto-unknown, modern-day species of coelacanth. The scientifically new species that this astonishing specimen represented was formally described in 1939 by eminent ichthyologist Prof. J. L. B. Smith, who named it Latimeria chalumnae, after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. She was the curator of South Africa's East London Museum and had seen and rescued the dead body of the specimen soon after it had been caught alive by a local fishing vessel, and had brought it to the attention of Prof. Smith, who was astonished to see that it was a coelacanth – thereby resurrecting an entire prehistoric lineage from many millions of years of supposed extinction.

Following the capture and preservation of this specimen, Smith sent out leaflets far and wide offering a big reward for further coelacanth specimens to study, but it was not until December 1952 that a second one was procured, in waters off the Comoro Islands in the Indian Ocean. Since then, many additional specimens have been obtained or filmed, mostly off the Comoros but also off Madagascar and elsewhere in waters off southeastern Africa.

Ironically, although unknown to science until 1938, this living species of coelacanth had always been familiar to the Comoro native people, who refer to it as the kombessa and have traditionally used its rough, tough scales as sandpaper, for roughening bicycle tyres when mending a puncture.