For a long time scientists believed the coelacanth had died out with the dinosaurs, about 70 million years ago. They knew it only from fossils. Then in December 1938, a South African museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer came across a strange fish that had been caught in a trawl net near the mouth of the Chalumna River. It was five feet long, with steel blue scales and odd, fleshy, limb-like fins. She knew it was something special and wrote to fish expert J.L.B. Smith, who was stunned. It was a living coelacanth. It was hailed as the most sensational natural history discovery of the century. Something everybody had written off as long gone was alive the whole time.
