East London and the Coelacanth

Where A Trawler Landed A Fish In December 1938 That Should Have Been Extinct For Sixty Six Million Years, And Marjorie Courtenay Latimer, The Museum'S Curator At Thirty Two, Recognised It As A Coelacanth And Refused To Be Told Otherwise The Specimen Is Still In The East London Museum, Which Also Holds The Only Known Dodo Egg, In A City At The Mouth Of The Buffalo River · East London, Eastern Cape

In December 1938 a trawler working off this coast landed a five-foot blue fish with limb-like fins that nobody on the boat recognised. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, thirty-two years old and curator of the small East London museum, went down to look at the catch, could not identify it, sketched it, preserved what she could and wrote to an ichthyologist at Grahamstown. It was a coelacanth, a fish known only from fossils more than sixty-six million years old and assumed extinct since long before the dinosaurs went. It remains one of the great zoological discoveries of the century, it happened because a young woman at an underfunded provincial museum refused to accept that she must be mistaken, and the specimen is still here on Oxford Street. The same museum holds the only known dodo egg. Between them those two objects make this the most under-visited serious collection in the country. Almost nobody goes.

On the Eastern Cape coast at the mouth of the Buffalo river, with the museum on Oxford Street, East London, Eastern Cape, South Africa

THE EAST LONDON MUSEUM on Oxford Street keeps daylight weekday hours with shorter Saturdays, closes on Sundays and some public holidays, and charges a small entry fee. IT IS A SMALL PROVINCIAL MUSEUM THAT HAS HAD FUNDING PROBLEMS, so some galleries have been closed at times - telephone if the coelacanth or the dodo egg is specifically why you are coming. The city's beaches, the Esplanade and the aquarium area are open ground. THE CITY HAS HAD SERIOUS WATER AND GOVERNANCE FAILURES, which affects hotels and restaurants more than visitors realise - ask your accommodation. There is an airport with Johannesburg and Cape Town flights, fuel, malls and a hospital. MALARIA-FREE.

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