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Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer (24 February 190717 May 2004) was the South African museum official who in 1938 brought to the attention of the world the existence of the coelacanth, a fish thought to have been extinct for sixty-five million years. ==Personal life== Courtenay-Latimer was born in East London, South Africa, the daughter of a stationmaster for South African Railways. She was born two months prematurely and throughout her childhood she was a sickly child, nearly dying on one occasion due to a diphtheria infection. Despite her frailty, from a young age she was an avid naturalist and enjoyed outdoor activities. When she visited her grandmother on the coast, she was fascinated by the lighthouse on Bird Island. At age eleven, she vowed she would become an expert on birds. After school, she trained to become a nurse at King William's Town but, just before finishing her training she was alerted to a job opening at the recently opened East London Museum. 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 twenty-four, August 1931.〔 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 back to East London. She never married due to the ″love of her life″ dying in her twenties.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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