CLOSE TO THE BONES

Photographs by Simon John Owen

It is 4.30pm on a Thursday in September, and my party is getting crotchety. We have been travelling through the African wilderness since dawn. It is 35C outside but, because we are low on fuel, we have turned the air conditioning of, raising temperatures literally and metaphorically. It has not rained for six months, and the scene resembles a set from Badlands: a seemingly never-ending view of fre-blackened earth, leafess trees and sunburnt grass. Tsetse fies are making meals of our sweating fesh. And although we have been travelling through the adjoining Mana Pools National Park, we have not seen a single creature for hours.

That is not because game is in short supply. Chewore Safari Area is one of Zimbabwe’s best-known hunting concessions, and is renowned for its (fast-disappearing) bull elephants and lions. But like us, we fgure, the animals are probably trying to avoid hunters. Besides, we are not here to game-spot, but to visit tracks of creatures that became extinct 65 million years ago: dinosaurs.

Although some signifcant contributions had been made to the fossil record by such great names as Geofrey Bond and Mike Raath, Zimbabwe was not well known for palaeontological fnds. Unlike Kenya and South Africa, where several hominid remains have been found, and Tanzania, where in the early 1900s dozens of dinosaur skeletons were excavated and transported to Berlin, Zimbabwe’s rocks had not yielded much to whet international palaeontological interest. Until 1984, that is, when an Australian hunter, Mike Aldersey, looked down in Chewore and saw prints of a creature far larger than he expected – and three-toed.

Unsure of what they were, he reported them, and when the news fltered back, a geologist from Zimbabwe’s Geological Survey was dispatched. What Tim Broderick and his wife, Patricia, saw, he tells me from his garden in Harare, was ‘extraordinary’. Sunk into

Surveying dinosaur prints in the bed of the Ntumbe River