Dig this! SA’s T-Rex ruled the Free State Andrew Unsworth
Meets the latest find in our rich palaeo history — the Highland Giant, a huge dinosaur who lived and rampaged in Clarens
DINOSAURS are fun — just ask any kid. Some of them even grow up to become real dinosaur hunters, and it’s hard to escape that thought as Dr Jonah Choiniere shows you around the vaults at the Wits Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences and the Evolutionary Studies Institute.
Choiniere, from Massachusetts in the US, conveys an infectious boyish enthusiasm and delight in his subject. He had worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, came to South Africa in 2008 to work in the Grahamstown museum, and fell in love with the country.
Now he and his wife both teach at the University of the Witwatersrand, which has had a good run on old bones. First we had the announcement of the Naledi discovery, a new hominid ancestor or relation that some quickly found to be offensive; now we have the far safer announcement of the biggest dinosaur yet found in South Africa — well, bits of it.
But Choiniere was not going to let me see his prize discovery that quickly. I had to work my way through other discoveries first, starting with the skull and bones of a Heterodontosaurus ,a beautifully articulated specimen that was found in a roadside stream bed near Dordrecht in the Eastern Cape.
Wits has applied to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility to have the bones scanned in the rock because its own CT scanner can’t penetrate it. The animal probably had feathers, because a related species found in China did too.
We move on to a cute pair of Massospondylus, which were found just 100m from Heterodontosaurus; these small, longnecked dinosaurs died with their necks intertwined, and became frozen in stone in that position for millions of years.
The species was named when explorers in the Cape colony first sent fossils back to the British Museum in the 1840s and ’50s. As all those specimens of Massospondylus were bombed during World War 2, Wits now holds what scientists call the type specimen, which is the world standard for the species.
In the huge underground vaults, there are yet more Massospondylus bones still largely imprisoned in rock and awaiting preparation: the painstaking chiselling out of the bedrock, often with a tiny jackhammer under a microscope. In fact, there is a queue of rocks cradled in plaster of paris awaiting attention, including four new dinosaurs that were unknown a year ago.
Time seems to move slowly in palaeontology, and researchers can have their work lined up far ahead, even with students doing much of the work, while experienced staff complete the finer details.
This, of course, is why Choiniere is here, and bursting with enthusiasm.
“So cool” comes into the conversation often, such as when he holds a jaw that reveals how the animal tore chunks out of its prey.
“You don’t get stuff like this sitting on your desk anywhere else in the world, maybe at one or two places in China or the US,” he says. “Here I can jump on a truck and four or five hours later I’m finding dinosaurs; it’s great fun and I like South Africa.
“There is a long history of dinosaur collecting in South Africa and recently we have been going out to revisit some sites where they have been found, some that have not been looked at for 40 or 50 years. This includes sites discovered by James Kitching.”
Kitching found bones in the late 1980s and early ’90s when inspecting excavations around Clarens in the eastern Free State, for the tunnels bringing water from Lesotho’s Katse Dam.
“He went down a steep valley system and found these huge dinosaur bones rolling down a hill. He never found where they were coming from, but he collected them, jokingly dismissing the find as just a bunch of chickens.”
They were stored in the university collection and were eventually put together, as being from one animal.
Adam Yates later went back and found more bones higher up a near-vertical cliff.
When he emigrated, Choiniere took over and had to buy a jackhammer to excavate deeper into the rock, exposing a giant femur of what they for now call the Highland Giant.
“We were digging around and saw a little bit of the femur; the next year we went back and it had eroded more and we were able to extract it. It is a right femur, and only the lower section near the knee, but it is 550mm to 600mm in circumference. The full length could have been about 1m to 1.2m, but even that is only half the length of the largest sauropod femur ever found.”
So who actually found the giant femur?
“Kitching, Yates, myself and my grad students,” he replies tactfully. “It took 20 years, from 1994 to 2015, to extract all the bones. Palaeontology is a bit slow, but then we are closer in time to T-Rex — 67 million years ago — than these bones were to T-Rex 200 million years ago.”
The time scales are hard to comprehend, as is the lost landscape: it was flat and much wetter and even the Drakensberg mountains did not yet exist.
Choiniere takes out a tail vertebra that is simply massive, despite missing the spine on top. “We have no idea what species this is, apart from being in the sauropod group of dinosaurs. It is still unknown whether it was a quadruped or a biped. The tail itself would have been 1.5m. The animal would have been 16m to 18m long and weighed about 14 tons: that’s more than two African bull elephants. Although that is small for a dinosaur, the toe claw we have is longer than a human hand.”
The femur is now rock encased in rock, and has been only partly freed, something like an unfinished Michelangelo sculpture — the biggest dinosaur bone ever discovered in South Africa.
Because they roamed Earth so long before we did — they became extinct 60 million years ago, whereas humans started their journey only about two million years ago — dinosaurs are safely in the past and unlikely to offend anyone apart from the most fervid of creationists.
They are the stuff of fantasy, but there are real bones to feel and hold. And they’re very cool.
Here I can jump on a truck and four or five hours later I’m finding dinosaurs