J. L. B. Smith (James Leonard Brierley Smith) was a South African chemist and ichthyologist.
Seeing a sketch sent by Courtenay-Latimer, he recognized the fish as a coelacanth, a group known only from fossils, and described it as a new species, Latimeria chalumnae, in 1939. He kept searching for a second specimen and worked hard to secure the one found in the Comoro Islands in 1952.
