Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was a curator at the East London Museum in South Africa.
In December 1938, among the fish landed by a local fishing boat, she spotted an unfamiliar fish with shining blue scales and limb-like fins, and took it back to the museum. It turned out to be a living coelacanth, a fish thought to have gone extinct about 66 million years ago. The scientific name Latimeria was named after her.
