21st December 1938 - Discovery of a coelacanth specimen trawled near East London
24th December 1952 - Discovery of a second coelacanth specimen in the Comoros
8th January 1968 - JLB Smith died by his own hand. He had been dogged by ill health for years and was afraid he was losing his mental faculties. In honour of his phenomenal achievements in ichthyology Rhodes University established the J.L.B. Smith Institute of Ichthyology in Grahamstown under the directorship of his widow, Prof. Margaret Smith, who ran the Institute until she retired on 30th April 1982.
1987 - Hans Fricke and his team become the first people to observe coelacanths in their natural habitat in the Comoros using their first submersible, Geo.
1991 - On the 11th of August, the first coelacanth catch from Mozambique was recorded. The fish was caught in 40-44m by a side trawler near the town of Pebane. Upon dissection, the 179cm fish weighing 98kg was found to contain 26 near term coelacanth pups.
1995 - On the 5th of August, a 32kg fish caught in a deep set shark gillnet at a depth of 140-150m off the village of Anakaó near Tulear marked the first authenticated catch of a coelacanth from Madagascar.
1997- In September, Dr. Mark Erdmann and his wife Arnaz see a strange looking fish placed on a cart in a fish market on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia whilst on honeymoon. They assume coelacanths have been recorded from Indonesia previously and did not purchase the specimen. Upon further investigation he learns that coelacanths have not been recorded from Indonesia. In an extensive programme of fisher interviews, Dr. Erdmann learns coelacanths are occasionally caught by the local fishermen who call them raja laut "king of the sea".
1998 - Dr. Erdmann's careful investigations pay off on the 30th of July, when Om Lameh Sonatham brings him a barely alive specimen caught in a deep set shark gillnet set off the island of Manado Tua, near Sulawesi. This specimen is determined to represent a new species, named Latimeria menadoensis.
2000 - 28th October Pieter Venter spots a coelacanth in a cave at 104m in Jesser Canyon, Sodwana Bay on a training dive with Peter Timm and Etienne le Roux. On approaching the cave more closely Venter and Timm saw two other individuals. On the 27th of November, they returned with a larger team (Pieter Venter, Gilbert Gunn, Christo Serfontein and Dennis Harding, with support divers Pieter Smith, Martin Bensch and Etienne le Roux) and video equipment, filming three coelcanths in a cave at 108m.
2001 - On the 26th April, the first coelacanth specimen from Kenya was caught by a prawn trawler near Malindi.
2002 - Launch of the South African Coelacanth Conservation and Genome Resource Programme, later renamed to the African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme (ACEP).
2003 On the 6th of September, the first Tanzanian coelacanth came to light. Since then, at least 20 other catches have been recorded from Tanzania.