Albany Museum Earth Sciences showcase
South Africa was in the fossil business long before the dinosaurs rocked up. In fact, more than 100 million years before the first dinosaurs were even born, the first land animals in Africa were walking around in an area that would eventually become known as the Makana Municipality. The sleepy hollow looked quite different then and was considerably closer to the South Pole.
These imagination-stretching facts come from a series of lectures presented this week at the Albany Museum. Four top scientists working with the Earth Sciences Department of the museum gave lectures in their respective fields of expertise to very fortunate audiences this week.
On Monday, Dr Billy De Klerk presented a lecture entitled Geological Endeavour at the Albany Museum over the past 161 years: Palaeontology, Mineralogy and Petrology. He retired from the museum in 2015 and realised that he had a wealth of institutional knowledge that would disappear when he moved on. So he designed his presentation as a vehicle to at least partially transfer his institutional knowledge to a younger generation of scientists.
De Klerk talked about larger-than-life personalities who worked at the museum and their achievements in the geological sciences. The first of these personalities was Dr Laurence Jameson, an early researcher who collected rocks and minerals in the Cape during the 1830s. He published the first geological account of the Eastern Cape in the Grahamstown Journal in 1838. Jameson is also credited with discovering the first Karoo fossil reptiles.
Andrew G Bain, a renowned road-maker who built many of the most difficult mountain passes in this country, occupied his spare time examining rocks that he cleared away to make space for a road. He is often considered to be the father of geology in South Africa and he even admitted to having frequent attacks of lithomania.
De Klerk talked about other remarkable scientists with Albany Museum links who had made substantial contributions to the understanding of the geology in our area. He highlighted the legendary achieve- ments of Dr William Guybon Atherstone; Sir Richard Owen; Dr Robert Broom; Dr Selmar Schonland; John Hewitt; Prof Ernest Hubert Lewis Schwarz; Prof E.D. Mountain; and many others including his own contributions.
The youngest scientist De Klerk mentioned was Dr Robert Gess who also happened to be the next speaker in the series.
Gess spoke about his amazing fossil finds in Devonian shale deposits outside Grahamstown. He identified the deposits when the roads department decided to build the N2 highway bypass. These rocks formed from muddy deposits laid down 360 million years ago and have already produced some significant plant and animal specimens.
These rare fossils include a scorpion, the first ever terrestrial animal to walk on the African continent; a wellpreserved lamprey that looks remarkably similar to lampreys of today; the oldest coelacanth nursery in the world; and a wide variety of interesting plants.
He has done most of his work on rocks excavated from Waterloo Farm where the N2 highway was cut, and more recently, Gess and his team have been working on deposits revealed where the highway is being widened 20km from Grahamstown.
The purpose of the talks was to draw attention to the remarkable, and often underappreciated work of scientists and curators in the Earth Sciences at the Albany Museum. Government funding for local museums has not been generous and the Museum entry fees are purposely kept low so that they can be accessible to all.
The Albany Museum established in 1855, is the second oldest museum in the country and is now inviting interested people to become more engaged with it. The Friends of the Albany Museum offers a number of benefits including free admission to all the museums, five complimentary tickets for your friends and the prospect of participating in the museum’s volunteer programme.
Grocott’s Mail will next week report on the two remaining lecturers of the Earth Sciences series and share more information about the work of this unique museum.