Coelacanth-- Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer

I was trying to explain to someone this week about “loving what I do” and that being enough when I sort of gave up. It is hard to explain how the excitement of work can make other very important things seem less so. Anyway the Coelacanth story is about someone who loved what she did. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was not a trained ichthyologist, someone who studies fish. But she discovered what was thought to be the extinct coelacanth. It would be like one of us finding a dinosaur in a meat market today. She was on the ship deck because she loved collecting and preparing specimens. And she had looked enough to recognize something new and unusual when she saw it.

She was born prematurely in 1907, and weighed only one and a half pounds. It’s amazing she survived. Her father is quoted as saying that he wished his child “would be a lover of all that is beautiful in nature…I want her to be a lover of animals and birds.” She grew up to become just that, an avid collector of nests, eggs, feathers, and ferns. At age 24, she landed a job in East London, South Africa as curator of the area’s first Natural History Museum. The place was empty and without much of a collection. She built it up with her avid collecting adding an assortment of natural things in order to create museum’s displays.

Three days before Christmas, in 1938, when Marjorie was 31 years old, she got a call at the museum that a ship captain she had befriended has just landed with a large catch of possible specimens. When she arrived on deck she saw a strange blue fin sticking out of the large pile of sharks etc. Sixty years later she describes the find, “I picked away the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen…It was five feet long, a pale, mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots: it had an iridescent silver blue sheen all over."

She had to talk her cab driver into to taking the 127 pound fish in his taxi. It was then that she began the almost impossible task of trying to preserve the unusual specimen. She was able to wrap it in paper coated with preservative and begin her writing campaign to get the experts down to South Africa to identify the fish. She knew it was old, possibly a coelacanth but needed an authority to confirm. It being Christmas week, this was difficult. Only someone who loved the find would have trudged onto that fish deck, spotted the masterpiece and found a way to save it and get it identified. There is a book written about these events, “A fish caught in Time” By Samantha Weinberg. It contains some of Marjorie’s drawings of the coelacanth.

Outside the fish department at the Field Museum is a large bronze replication of a coelacanth. It is about 5 feet from the door to the collections / scientist’s offices. When I began painting this sculpture on a 5 foot piece of paper, the scientists would pass behind me every morning on their way to work. I practically never interrupt a scientist with specific questions about the material I am painting (except for Dave Willard and Jim Louderman, but that is another story), but in this case, it came naturally.

“The fin is on backward” was the first comment I heard from behind me. Somehow the mount was wrong and luckily this was an easy change to make. Next they had suggestions on the color issues. I was most fortunate in where the mount was situated, and was directed by those that knew, as to what colors to use. I appreciated and looked forward to what the scientists had to offer, it was invaluable. The whole coelacanth experience, illustrated the magic of working in a natural history Museum, one of the many things I have in common with Marjorie Courtenay Latimer!