"The Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) has been present in the fossil record since the Devonian period, approximately four hundred million years ago. The author's notes from the Natural History Museum in London, made during a research visit in 1931, record it as extinct — specifically as 'extinct since approximately the Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary, 65 million years before present.' On the fourteenth of December 1938, this note required revision. The revision was as follows: the coelacanth is not extinct. It has been in the deep water off the Southern African coast for four hundred million years. It was not found until 1938 because it lives between one hundred and seven hundred metres below the surface and comes up only at night. The author had not previously considered this as an explanation for the absence of field observations. He considers it now."
The specimen at the East London Museum was not the original.
The original — what remained of it after the decomposition that had occurred before Professor Smith could reach East London in January 1939 — was a mounted skin with its bones, the soft tissue gone. What the Colonel stood before was a cast, a careful reconstruction, in the glass case in the room that the museum had dedicated to the discovery: Latimeria chalumnae, the fish that Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had found in the catch of the trawler Nerine on the fourteenth of December 1938.
He had his Natural History Museum notes.
He had written, in the margin of the relevant page, in his own hand, in 1931: extinct, Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary, 65 million years BP, confirmed.
He stood in front of the cast for some time.
She had nearly fainted. He had read this in the museum's account — the moment Courtenay-Latimer saw the fish in the trawler's catch: five feet long, blue-grey, heavy-bodied, with lobed fins unlike any fish she knew. She was twenty-six years old. She was the curator of a small museum in a small city on the South African coast. She had been coming to the docks whenever the trawlers came in, looking for anything unusual, because that was what the job required.
She had found the most significant zoological specimen of the twentieth century in a pile of fish on a dock.
She had wrapped it in Christmas wrapping paper — the museum had no refrigeration adequate to the task and she was improvising — and arranged for it to be taken to a taxidermist while she tried to reach Smith. She had drawn a sketch and written a letter. She had sent a telegram:
MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVATION ALIVE STOP
The Colonel read this telegram, which was framed on the museum wall.
He thought about the word alive. About what it meant to write alive of something that every available scientific authority had filed as extinct for sixty-five million years. About the certainty of the filing, accumulated across two centuries of palaeontology, and the four words it had taken to revise it.
MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVATION ALIVE STOP.
He thought about his own field notes. About the things he had written and filed. About what it meant to stand in front of evidence that the filing was wrong.
"The category 'extinct,'" he wrote, "was revised on the fourteenth of December 1938 by a twenty-six-year-old museum curator on a South African dock. The author's note from 1931 reading 'confirmed: extinct' required no further tools to revise. It required a trawler and a woman who knew what she was looking at."