Bringing History to Life
In South Africa, Scientists are Piecing Together Dinosaur Fossils from a ‘Triassic Park’ By Heather Djunga
P
utting together a giant jigsaw puzzle can be a lot of fun! Especially when the pieces are millions of years old. Jonah Choinière of the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his team of paleontologists put together the pieces of two giant dinosaur skeletons during the recent lockdown period in South Africa. These skeletons were among many fossil remains of prehistoric creatures shepherd Dumangwe Thyobeka found in 2018 in Qhemegha, a village in Eastern Cape Province. Thyobeka had seen what appeared to be dinosaur bones — he reasoned that they were much too big to be cattle bones. He knew to notify the authorities, and Choinière said he could still remember how excited he was when he and his team arrived at the site. “There were dinosaur bones and fossils sticking out everywhere, although to the untrained eye, these fossils wouldn’t be immediately obvious,” he said. “There might have been a water hole there millions of years ago, because of the richness of the find.” Choinière said they had unearthed a lost world, which some have nicknamed “Jurassic Park.” But it’s more of a “Triassic Park,” as most of the finds date to the Triassic Period (252 million to 201 million years ago). Some of the finds are as old as 220 million years old. The site has had a lot of international media coverage over the past two years because of its rich heritage and significance to the field of paleontology. Choinière explained the excavation team had uncovered an ecosystem hidden from view for more than 200 million years. An ecosystem is made of a whole lot of animals, plants and other creatures that rely on one another to survive. “In addition to the dinosaurs we have found on
the site, we have hundreds of bones of other animals, including early mammal relatives, early crocs and some things we cannot yet identify,” he said. “That means there were a lot of different types of animals alive on the same spot at the same time — and that it wasn’t just dinosaurs! If you went on a safari then you’d see way more than just dinosaurs.” Work on the site began in 2018 and continued until just before the 2020 lockdown. Choinière said they had just uncovered A digger flips a quarry with five new species in it when the country was locked down because of Cape Province the coronavirus. Fortunately for the team, they had already lifted significant (and big) fossil material from the site — using forklifts, gantry cranes and flatbed trucks — and transported it to their lab at the University of the Witwatersrand. “The first fossil we prepared was a total surprise,” he said. “We thought it was a jumble of many different animals, but it turned out to be this huge sauropodomorph, with all the bones just mixed up!” A sauropodomorph is a huge plant-eating dinosaur with a long neck and tiny head. It evolved to become the largest land animals of all time. “I’ve never dealt with anything this size before,” Choinière said of the fossil. “Even the plaster jackets, used for making impressions of the fossils, were so big we had to use special equipment to open them.” As of now, the new species of dinosaurs remains unnamed. “There are many ways to name a dinosaur. You just need to make sure that the name has more than one letter and you can’t name it after
68 | ABA Publications | Africa TRAVEL | May 2021
