South African naturalist and museum curator from East London. The daughter of a stationmaster of South African Railways, she had a fascination for birds and developed her interest in natural history when she attended a Holy Cross Convent School in Aliwal North where he biology teacher, Sister Camilla, had a collection of fossil fish. Though she trained as a nurse, she joined the East London Museum (1931-1973) as the first paid curator and was later appointed director. Courtenay-Latimer aquired local material for the museum particularly in 1936 on a three month visit to Bird Island off the East Cape coast which included botanical specimens.

She rapidly achieved international fame after she was searching for unusual fish specimens for the museum on 22 December 1938 in the catch of trawlerman Hendrik Goosen at the East London docks. An odd-looking blue fish with pale spots and an iridescent sheen caught her attention and later proved to belong to a group that achieved its peak of development in the Devonian and had been believed to be extinct for 200 million years. It was identified by zoologist James Leonard Brierley Smith from Rhodes University who published the new species as Latimeria chalumnae after Courtenay-Latimer and the Chalumna River where it was found. It would be another 14 years before the second coelacanth specimen was found.

After her retirement to a farm at Tsitsikama, she became increasingly interested in botany, co-authoring a book on the flora, The Flowering Plants of the Tsitsikama Forest and Coastal National Park (1967) with G.G. Smith and assisting her book's illustrators, Auriol Batten and Hertha Bokelmann, with their own book Wild Flowers of the Eastern Cape Province. She was a founder member of South African Museums Association, the Border Historical Society, the Border Wild Flower Association and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Rhodes University in 1971.