Small Shelly Fauna

It's Gonna Take A Lot To Drag Me Away From You

Last time I was in Africa, I wrote about the irony of hearing Toto's "Africa" playing while I was at a restaurant. Now I think that there is some kind of law that requires African eateries to play this song, because I recently sat down to dinner at a pub in Grahamstown, and what should start playing but the familiar string of, "I hear the drums echoing tonight..." Attention pop musicians: please write more songs about Africa so we can get some frickin' variety in the dining music here.

Limited song options aside, Grahamstown treated me well (very well indeed...), and I have now moved on to the final leg of my journey: East London, on the southeastern edge of the Eastern Cape. It's a beach city, and one of the most famous surf sites in South Africa (and where there is South African surfing, there are equally legendary great white attacks). I am here for a single day, and on the morn I leave first on a flight from here back to Joburg, and thereon out back to the States. While here, I stopped at the East London Museum, which houses a single therapsid skull of interest to me, but also, more famously, houses the original specimen (the holotype) of the coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae, discovered in 1938 by Ms. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer of the East London Museum and described by J.L.B. Smith (for whom the ichthyological institute in Grahamstown was formerly named before being redubbed into the infinitely more pedestrian South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity). The specimen was rotten when it was described, and the years since have not been especially kind to it (see photo above), but it is positively redolent of scientific history, and there are few bigger milestones in the history of modern zoology than its discovery.