Valley of Old Bones

Come to Nieu Bethesda and peel back the historic layers of the Karoo, until you discover a world of snarling, big-toothed characters who were cut short in their prime.

By Julienne du Toit

Pictures by Chris Marais

A Long, Long, Time Ago

Picture the scene – a giant dragonfly’s view, 252 million years ago. Before you, a tangle of broad meandering rivers flow to the horizon. The shallow hills and plains are green with clubmosses, ferns, horsetails and the ever-present Glossopteris trees.

There’s not much other colour because the Earth has yet to invent flowers. There is no grass, there are no birds, nor butterflies, nor are there bees.

In a fold in the river, a herd of tusked Aulacephalodons rip at the tough vegetation with their beaked mouths. Nearby, tiny Diictodonts let out warning squeaks at the sight of an oncoming Gorgonopsian.

It ambles towards them, a fearless cold stone killer with vicious sabre-teeth, really good for disemboweling.

A panicky Lystrosaurus dives into the nearest burrow, followed by its family.

Kitching Fossil Centre, Nieu Bethesda

It’s a scenario that must have unfolded scores of times on the land where the Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre in Nieu Bethesda stands today.

But this weird world was about to end. In a few thousand years, nearly all life on the Permian Earth would vanish forever, leaving only isolated survivors, fossilised remains and a few intriguing clues.

Dr Roger Smith of Iziko Museum in Cape Town is a regular visitor to this part of the Karoo. He’s a man obsessed, a palaeontological detective hunting for the proverbial smoking gun. What hideous fate befell the Earth and nearly wiped out all life on the planet? What survived and why?

First, he says, we need to imagine the planet as it was then. The Permian era was also the age of Pangaea, a huge supercontinent where all continents on Earth were linked together. The land that would one day drift free as Africa was completely land-locked, wedged between South America, Antarctica, India and North America.

The rest of the planet was solidly blue, taken up by the vast ancestral ocean.

The Big Die-Off

“In many ways, Earth was pre-conditioned for disaster,” says Smith. “In today’s world, carbon cycles through plants, atmosphere and ocean, but in those days, the currents were blocked at the equator and the poles.

“So when climate change began, it accelerated quickly.”

Climate change? Global warming killed off 96% of all life on Earth?

Oh yes, says Roger Smith. Circumstantial evidence implicates massive volcanic activity in Siberia, pumping out carbon dioxide and methane over millennia. This, and other causes, perhaps, changed the planet’s climate to such an extent that catastrophe ensued.

Unlike the massive meteorite that crashed into the Yucatan Sea, wiping out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, this disaster unfolded in slow motion.

The lush inland floodplain became hotter and hotter, withering plants and exposing soil to fierce winds. Sand clogged the rivers and covered the carcasses of dead animals.

“The dying off would have taken between 10 000 years (which is what we call a ‘geological instant’) and 100 000 years.”

Meet Lystrosaurus

Lystrosaurus was the most notable survivor, and its fossilised bones around here far outnumber any others after the Permian extinction.

“They survived because they were able to escape the heat by burrowing, and because they were able to eat hard, drought-resistant vegetation,” explains Smith.

The apocalyptic conditions actually fast-tracked evolution, forcing adaptations that would ultimately result in some creatures developing their more mammal-like attributes.

The Karoo is the best place in the world to understand this fascinating epoch linking Permian, Triassic and Jurassic ages. Almost 100 million years of Earth’s history are written here, the stone pages remarkably intact.

Meet Prof Bruce Rubidge

Professor Bruce Rubidge grew up close to Nieu Bethesda, and throughout his youth was inspired and coached by two palaeontological giants – his grandfather Sidney Rubidge and the legendary James Kitching.

One of his very earliest memories is of finding a wedge of concrete, vaguely shaped like a small fossil skull. In great excitement he leapt on his tricycle and pedaled at top speed to his grandfather to show him this fabulous discovery.

“My granddad took it, and praised me for making a great find. The next time I saw it, he had chiseled little eyes, nostrils and teeth into it.”

Rubidge is now head of the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontology at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Driving a standard-issue white University bakkie from Nieu Bethesda to the Lootsberg Pass, Rubidge points out the long level layers of sediment that characterise the hills of this dry heartland, left there by huge shifting rivers, carrying silt down from the Himalaya-like mountain ranges that stood north and south of the Karoo. Without the silt, there would have been no fossils preserved.

“This area of the Karoo is a kind of paradise for palaeontologists,” he sighs happily.

Near the top of the pass we scramble up the crumbling mudstone and actually see the fossils of small Lystrosauri curled up in their burrows.

Be a Blender and a Burrower - Not Like the Gorgonopsian Fella

Bruce Rubidge started the Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre in the heart of Nieu Bethesda in 2005 to expose the public to the excitement of the ancient Karoo and its immense fossil wealth.

Within the small building you’ll see life-sized reconstructed Dicynodonts, the fearsome Gorgonopsian, a compelling version of a Lystrosaurus, and a scene that looks utterly unlike the Karoo today.

Guides trained by the Bernard Price Institute are on hand to explain everything, and will show you how painstaking it is to extract fossils from rock. Best of all, they will take you out along the Gats River to look at dozens of Permian fossils studded in the rocks.

Human evolution and existence rests on a long and continuous line of unlikely beasties that have mysteriously sidestepped no less than five major extinction events. Ironic then, that we have triggered the sixth – climate change (again) and sheer destruction of habitat. And a bit worrying that the survivors of the Earth’s five major extinction events have almost invariably been the smallest creatures. Scientists call it the Lilliputian effect. Always a burrower and a blender be, it seems.

Ganora Guest Farm

Once you’ve seen the Kitching Fossil Research Centre, you must visit Ganora, a beautifully situated nearby farm in the shadow of the Compassberg.  (See Country Life November 2007 edition.)

JP Steynberg will take you on the most delightful fossil tour. At the end, it’s very likely you will see meerkats, since Hester often rehabilitates them for release into the wild.

They scratch in the earth to find goggas and scorpions, and need almost no water. They live in burrows.

It doesn’t need a genius to work out that these meerkats and their progeny are far more likely to survive the Sixth Extinction Event than we and our genes are.

As they always have, the meek inherit the Earth.

• The best places to see fossils around Nieu Bethesda are the Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre (Tel 049 849 1733 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or Ganora Guest Farm (Tel 049 841 1302 or 082 698 0029, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).
• Outsiders in Nieu Bethesda offers a variety of places to stay within walking distance of the Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre. Contact Ian or Katrin Alleman on 049 841 1642 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

KITCHING CONFIDENTIAL

You can tell a lot about a man from his hat. James Kitching’s specimen resides under glass at the Fossil Centre in Nieu Bethesda that carries his name.

It’s a battered brown felt hat that Indiana Jones would have felt proud to wear. Twenty years of living in a tent out in the harsh Karoo will do that to a hat. The leopardskin hatband looks regrettably real.

The fossil-finding bug was awoken in James Kitching by his father Croonie Kitching, a road-builder who had spotted interesting looking bones in the rocks back in the 1930s near his home in Nieu Bethesda.

Robert Broom

After corresponding with leading palaeontologist Robert Broom about them, Croonie started hunting for them in earnest. Broom had offered to pay Croonie for any fossils he found.

When his son James was six years old, Croonie recruited him and his sharp eyes to the fossil hunting cause. When James was seven, he found his first new species: a small lizard-like creature that was named in his honour: Youngopsis kitchingi.

After serving in World War II, James Kitching was recruited to be the first staff member appointed to the newly established Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. His mandate: to collect Karoo fossils.

Kitching headed straight for his old fossil-hunting grounds of the hills near Graaff Reinet. Within five months he had excavated around 200 fossilised skulls, most of them therapsids, mammal-like reptiles.

His pace hardly wavered and he carried on collecting fossils long after he retired in 1990.

James Kitching - An Insight into Permian Life

His legacy is a museum at Wits University and a huge fossil collection used by visiting palaeontologists from around the world.

James Kitching had an uncanny insight into Permian life, how the animals lived, their distribution and the timeline in which things happened.

His contribution to South African palaeontology is legendary, but Kitching is best remembered for his almost supernatural ability to see fossils in rocks.

When a team of American scientists were seeking some proof that southern Africa and Antarctica were once joined, they called on Kitching and took him to Antarctica.

Once there, Kitching was choppered over a rocky shelf and immediately, from a height and through blowing snow, he saw the likeliest place for what he was seeking: the fossilised skeleton of Thrinaxodon, the twin of which had been found close to Bethulie.

Legend has it that the helicopter landed, Kitching sprinted below the rotors, crouched to verify an exposed fossil, and then looked back and nodded. The continents had once been joined.

• For more information on the Bernard Price Institute, see www.wits.ac.za/geosciences/BPI.

SO YOU WANT TO BE A FOSSIL?

Do you dream that your bones may one day end up in the museum of a new civilization an aeon from now? Only one in a million creatures ends up as a fossil, so plan now:

1. Die on a floodplain close to a meandering river in a lowland area where silt and mud accumulate.
2. Die where you’ll get buried in mud and sand, preferably on a lakeshore or a migrating sand dune.
3. Avoid being eaten by big scavenging bone-crunchers like hyena. Better still, die in a burrow, but definitely avoid being buried in a coffin.
4. Either way, get buried quickly. Within five years your bones will disintegrate if they’re exposed. A collapsed burrow, a tar pit or simple quicksand would be ideal.
5. You’ll need your bones to be mineralised within 50 000 years, so your resting place should ideally have plenty of limestone in the soil. This will also stop them becoming flattened.
6. Avoid places where there might be volcanoes or earthquakes.
7. Try to die in a place where an experienced fossil finder will discover you in a million years.

(With thanks to the Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre.)