Smith, James Leonard Brierley (1897-1968), a South African expert on fish, was the first person to identify the coelacanth as a living species. The coelacanth is a primitive fish that lived more than 300 million years ago. Scientists believed it was extinct until a specimen was caught in 1938.
Smith was born in Graaff-Reinet, in what is now the South African province of Eastern Cape. In 1923, he became a lecturer in chemistry at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Smith’s passion for fishing led him to devise a unique system of fish classification. In January 1939, the curator of the East London Museum, Marjorie Courtenay Latimer, sent him a sketch of a strange fish and asked him to identify it. It had been netted the previous year off the southeast coast of South Africa. Smith was convinced that it was a coelacanth and classified it scientifically as Latimeria chalumnae. Several expeditions looked for a second specimen, and one was caught in 1952. Since then, several more specimens have been caught. At Rhodes, Smith was honored by being appointed the first professor of ichthyology (study of fishes) in South Africa. He died on Jan. 7, 1968.
