Coelacanth: Rediscovered

Summary: In 1938 something amazing happened in a small town off the eastern coast of South Africa. Join Kiersten as she reveals the unbelievable story of how the coelacanth, a fish thought extinct for millions of years, was rediscovered. 

For my hearing impaired listeners, a complete transcript of this podcast follows the show notes on Podbean.

 

Shoe Notes: 

A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth by Samantha Weinberg

Music written and performed by Katherine Camp

 

Transcript

(Piano music plays)

Kiersten - This is Ten Things I Like About…a ten minute, ten episode podcast about unknown or misunderstood wildlife.

(Piano music stops)

Welcome to Ten Things I Like About… I’m Kiersten, your host, and this is a podcast about misunderstood or unknown creatures in nature. Some we’ll find right out side our doors and some are continents away but all are fascinating. 

This podcast will focus ten, ten minute episodes on different animals and their amazing characteristics. Please join me on this extraordinary journey, you won’t regret it.

This episode begins a new series about an animal thought to have been extinct since the time of the dinosaurs, but as this episode will show the coelacanth has been here all along and this is the first thing I like about them.

We’ll begin with the unbelievable story of the rediscovery of this amazing animal.

Let me set the scene for you: It’s 1938 in the town of East London, South Africa. East London sits on the eastern coast of South Africa and harbors a bustling fishing industry. It’s a hot and humid December day and the young, female curator of the East London Museum is hustling to get her newest exhibition completed before they close for the upcoming Christmas holiday. As Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer is painstakingly assembling a rare dinosaur fossil, a startling sound shatters the peace of the museum and her concentration. It’s the ringing of the newly installed phone and she doesn’t know it yet, but it’s the sound of destiny calling. 

On the other end of the phone is the manager of the Irvin and Johnson trawler fleet. Mr. Jackson would call Marjorie when his ships came back to port with specimens that she might be interested in for the museum. This day Majorie was so stressed to get things organized before the holiday break that she almost said No, but she didn’t want to jeopardize her relationship with the shipping company manager. She decided to take a quick break and see what she could see.

She had no idea what she’d find when she stepped onto the deck of the Nerine. Over the phone Mr. Jackson had indicated that several pounds of sharks were available for her perusal. The museum didn’t need any sharks currently and Marjorie had decided that she’d most likely not take anything, but she took a look through the pile of fish on the forecastle deck anyway. She found sharks, seaweed, starfish, sponges, rat-tail fish, and many more. She carefully sorted through the pile but saw nothing she of interest which strengthened her reserve to take nothing that day. 

About halfway through she noticed a blue fin, not the usual faire, and she dug down through slime and scales to take a closer look. What she’d found was a fish, a very unusual fish.

A quote from the book A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth by Samantha Weinberg expresses the discovery in Marjorie’s own words.

“I picked away the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen,” she recounts. “It was five feet long, a pale, mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots; it had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over it. It was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb-like fins and a strange little puppy dog tail. It was such a beautiful fish - more like a big china ornament - but I didn’t know what it was.” End quote.

The fisherman who stood by watching, said in thirty years of fishing he’d never seen anything thing like it. They’d caught it at a depth of forty  fathoms, 240 feet, off the mouth of the Chalumna River. When the captain of the ship first saw the catch he’d thought it so beautiful he’d almost set it free. Marjorie’s gut told her to take it. 

She and her museum assistant, Enoch, wrapped the fish in a bag and transported it back to the museum to give it a more complete inspection. It was weighed and measured and Marjorie sketched a rough picture of this puzzling fish. The specimen weighed in at 127 pounds and a voice in Marjorie’s head kept circling back to something she’d learned as a child in grade school. She’d gotten in a bit of trouble with her teacher and had to write a sentence as punishment.

‘A ganoid fish is a fossil fish.’ She had to write it twenty-five times and; therefore, never forgot the statement. Essentially it means a ganoid fish is a fish that has long been extinct and is only seen in the fossil records. (As an aside, Ganoid also refers to a type of scale that can be found in extant fishes such as bowfin, gars, paddlefish, and sturgeon.) This sentence kept running through her head as she examined the fish in front of her, but logically it could not be a ganoid fish because this was a fresh specimen caught just that morning. 

She looked through all the books she had on fish but nothing matched. She decided she must preserve the fish for future examination by someone with a bit more knowledge than herself. Preserving a five foot, 127 pound fish was not something that could be done in the museum, so she had to come up with some alternate plans. First she asked the mortuary if they’d place it in one of their lockers, since the were refrigerated. The mortician balked at storing a giant fish with the bodies of the human dead, he was worried what the town might think. Then she thought of the food storage building. It also hade refrigeration, but that was also a no go. 

Her final option was the taxidermist and he was certainly up for the challenge. Between the two of them they wrapped the humongous fish in formalin soaked towels and stored it in the taxidermist’s store. Next, Marjorie sent a letter to James Leonard Brierley Smith, a chemist lecturer at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa. J.L.B. Smith was an amateur ichthyologist and acted as the honorary curator of fishes for the smaller museums along the south coast, such as the East London Museum. She asked for his help in identifying a strange fish she’d found and sent along her sketch of said fish. 

Because of the holiday, his response was delayed several days. As she waited, Marjorie checked in on her find daily. Despite all their hard work the fish was inevitably deteriorating. The taxidermist had to get to work at his trade to save any portion of the fish. Finally, an answer came back from JLB Smith. It was most likely a coelacanth. Marjorie was gobsmacked. The coelacanth was a fish thought to have gone extinct during the time of the dinosaurs. They hadn’t existed outside of a fossil for 65 million years, or so we thought. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer’s discovery shook the scientific community.  

I hope this episode whet your appetite to learn more about the coelacanth because their rediscovery is my first favorite thing about these forgotten fish.

If you’d like to know more about Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and the rediscovery of the coelacanth, I highly recommend the book A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth by Samantha Weinberg. It is one of my favorite non-fiction reads. 

 

If you're enjoying this podcast please recommend me to friends and family and take a moment to give me a rating on whatever platform your listening. It will help me reach more listeners and give the animals I talk about an even better chance at change. 

 

Join me next week for another episode about the coelacanth.  

 

(Piano Music plays) 

This has been an episode of Ten Things I like About with Kiersten and Company. Original music written and performed by Katherine Camp, piano extraordinaire.