East London Museum 
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At the north end of Oxford Street is the East London Museum (established 1931), perhaps the most interesting natural history museum in the country, with numbers of unusual exhibits.
The star attraction of the museum is the coelacanth, a fish with limb-like fins which until it was caught in the Chalumna River, near East London, in 1938 was believed to have become extinct more than 50 million years ago. (There are now known to be between 200 and 300 of these "prehistoric" fish in the waters off the Comoro Islands in the Indian Ocean; the specimen caught here had presumably been carried south by the current.) The museum also has numerous specimens of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, as well as a dodo's egg. There is an anthropological section with material on the culture of the Xhosa
The star attraction of the museum is the coelacanth, a fish with limb-like fins which until it was caught in the Chalumna River, near East London, in 1938 was believed to have become extinct more than 50 million years ago. (There are now known to be between 200 and 300 of these "prehistoric" fish in the waters off the Comoro Islands in the Indian Ocean; the specimen caught here had presumably been carried south by the current.) The museum also has numerous specimens of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, as well as a dodo's egg. There is an anthropological section with material on the culture of the Xhosa
Address:
East London Museum, 319 Oxford Street, Box 11021, East London, Eastern Cape 5201, South Africa
Hours:
9:30am-5pm; Sun: 11am-4pm; Sat: 2pm-5pm
Always closed on: Christmas - Christian (December 25), Good Friday - Christian
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