Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer
| Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer 24 February 1907 East London, Eastern Cape, South Africa |
| Died | 17 May 2004 (aged 97) East London, Eastern Cape, South Africa |
| Fields | Natural history, Palaeontology |
| Institutions | East London Museum |
| Known for | The discovery of the Coelacanth |
| Notable awards | Honorary doctorate from Rhodes University |
Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer (24 February 1907 – 17 May 2004) was the South African museum official who in 1938 brought to the attention of the world the existence of the coelacanth, a fish thought to have been extinct for sixty-five million years.
Courtenay-Latimer was born in East London, South Africa, the daughter of a stationmaster for South African Railways. She was born two months prematurely and throughout her childhood she was a sickly child, nearly dying on one occasion due to a diphtheria infection. Despite her frailty, from a young age she was an avid naturalist and enjoyed outdoor activities. When she visited her grandmother on the coast, she was fascinated by the lighthouse on Bird Island. At age eleven, she vowed she would become an expert on birds.
After school, she trained to become a nurse at King William's Town but, just before finishing her training she was alerted to a job opening at the recently opened East London Museum, East London, Eastern Cape. Although never having received any formal training, she impressed her interviewers with her range of South African naturalistic knowledge and was hired at the age of twenty-four, August 1931.
Courtenay-Latimer spent the rest of her career at the museum, retiring first to a farm at Tsitsikamma where she wrote a book on flowers and then back to East London.
She never married due to the ″love of her life″ dying in her twenties.
She busily worked on collecting rocks, feathers, shells, and the like for her museum, and made her desire to see unusual specimens known to fishermen. On 22 December 1938, she received a telephone call that such a fish had been brought in. She went to the docks to inspect the catch of Captain Hendrik Goosen. "I picked away at the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen," she said. "It was five feet (150 cm) long, a pale mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots; it had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over. It was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy dog tail."
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