East London Museum

In December 1938 Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the young curator of this museum, went to look at a trawler's catch on the East London docks and found a large blue fish she did not recognise. She sketched it, could not preserve the soft parts, and sent the drawing to the ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith, who identified it as a coelacanth - a fish known only from fossils and believed extinct for around sixty-five million years. That specimen is here, and it is the museum's reason to exist in the wider world. The collection also holds the original slab of the Nahoon footprints, hominin tracks about 124,000 years old found on the coast nearby, and a dodo egg whose authenticity has been debated for decades. Founded in 1921, it also shows southern Nguni beadwork, a maritime gallery and a working beehive. It is a modest municipal museum with two or three genuinely significant objects in it, which is a better ratio than most.

Highlights

• The 1938 coelacanth - the specimen that proved a fish thought extinct for millions of years was not.
• The Latimer story - a young curator who recognised something odd and sketched it.
• The Nahoon footprints - the original slab, about 124,000 years old.
• The dodo egg - a contested specimen whose authenticity has been argued over for decades.

When to go

All year. Two hours. Weekday mornings; hours are shorter at weekends.

Good to know

It is a small municipal museum and parts of it are dated. The coelacanth is one case among many - do not expect a dedicated hall. Funding constraints show in places.

Nearby

Nahoon Point and its reserve are north-east; the beachfront is close.

Key facts