Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer (24 February 1907 – 17 May 2004) was a South African museum official, who in 1938, brought the existence of the coelacanth, a fish thought to have been extinct for 65 million years, to the attention of the world.

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 24 in August 1931.

[2] 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 headed back to East London.

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.

She eventually took it to a taxidermist of her acquaintance, Robert Center, who helped her wrap it in formalin-soaked newspaper and bedsheets so that it could be preserved for identification by her friend J. L. B. Smith, an ichthyologist at Rhodes University.