>> ROGER BENSON (Curator, Division of Paleontology): We came down to this site and there were literally
bones falling out of the hills all over the place.
Almost everywhere we go, we can excavate bones of all kinds of different animals–predatory
theropod dinosaurs, long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs, jaws and teeth of small mammals
and their relatives, other extinct groups of fossil reptiles.
In South Africa, in the Late Triassic, almost everything we’ve found is new.
In fact, we haven’t found anything that was previously known before.
>>BENSON: Right now I’m on an expedition to South Africa, and we’re looking for dinosaurs,
and the other animals that lived alongside them more than 200 million years ago in the
Late Triassic.
I’ve been working here for the last five years with my collaborator, Jonah Choiniere,
from the Evolutionary Studies Institute of Wits University.
>>JONAH CHOINIERE (Professor, University of Witwatersrand): We’re here in the village
of Qhemegha, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, right on the border of the
Orange River where it dumps out of the highlands of Lesotho, and we’re sitting actually on
rocks that were laid down in the early Jurassic period, about 200 million years ago.
And we can see fossils actually coming out of the ground.
>>MENG JIN (Curator, Division of Paleontology): This year is my first opportunity to do field
work in Africa.
It’s a new place to me, and it’s basically it’s dinosaur site.
I work on fossil mammals.
Finding a small mammal is quite different.
The age of the rock that we are looking at that’s about the time mammals originated.
And that sediment will likely contain the fossils that will be the ancestor or the first
mammals.
>>BENSON: We were originally called to work here by the local community, and they’ve
been hugely supportive of what we’re doing.
>>CHOINIERE: There’s a core group of what they call community pioneers here.
And probably the chief among these community pioneers is a man named Sginyane Ralane.
He goes by Sgi.
So Sgi was present when the first fossils were found, and he recognized them as ancient
animals.
>>SGINYANE RALANE (Community pioneer, Qhemegha Village) (Translated): We found them in 2015…
A man called Dumangwe Tyhobeka was the first person to find these bones and he came and
told me.
I’m lucky we found them in my lifetime.
>>RALANE: Jonah came with a group and prospect the whole area, then they agreed that it was
rich in fossils.
That was the first time when we knew that this was a dino grave- gravesite.
>>BENSON: So we don’t know why there are so many bones here.
But we sure know there are a lot of fossils.
>>CHOINIERE: We spend a lot of time on the landscape really just walking with our heads
hunched over, looking at the ground.
We’re lucky here in Qhemegha because there’s just so many bones, that we quite often find
something.
And in fact, every day we find a new fossil.
>>BENSON: Sometimes all we find is the stuff on the surface.
But oftentimes we find that there are bones going into the rock.
So in these cases, we can spend weeks and months carefully excavating, digging a quarry.
The goal of the quarry is to dig around those bones and make field jackets out of plaster
and burlap that protect the bones so we can transport them back to the prep lab, and then
there carefully, under controlled conditions, excavate the bones from the rock.
>>CHOINIERE: All the fossils here tell us a bigger picture, which is change in Earth
ecosystem over the time.
In the Triassic, all of Earth’s continents are glued together into a single giant super
continent, which we call Pangaea.
They show ecosystems where dinosaurs aren’t the dominant animals.
In fact, it’s mainly things that are related to crocs.
As the Earth’s tectonics change into the Jurassic, the first thing that happens is
the Atlantic Ocean begins to form.
There’s actually a rift, and that occurs between North and South America, and Europe
and Africa.
There’s a huge amount of lava that pours out on the Earth’s surface, and this lava
releases greenhouse gases, and it also changes the chemistry of the ocean.
The animals that are on land are facing shifts in global temperature, or rapid fluctuations
in maybe seasonal rainfall, and they can’t adapt, and they go extinct.
And suddenly there’s a shift, and all of a sudden everything we find is a dinosaur,
and it’s very rare to find these croc line animals.
>>BENSON: We don’t know exactly why dinosaurs survived when other things became extinct,
but it caused a major change in the biosphere that we’re interested in studying as paleontologists.
So by studying the fossils here, we hope to get a much more clear picture of the End-Triassic
mass extinction event.
Because this area preserves an almost continuous sequence of rocks that starts in the latest
Triassic and ends in the early Jurassic.
So, spanning this mass extinction event, and by getting fossils from this area, we’ll
get a really clear understanding of what species were around just before the event, and who
went extinct during the event.
>>BENSON: There were several different types of dinosaurs living on the landscape in the
late Triassic here.
So we’ve got Sauropodomorphs.
The Sauropodomorphs are the early cow-sized relatives of the Sauropod dinosaurs.
And there were also predatory Theropod dinosaurs.
They’re early in the history of the group.
And strangely, although we knew they were present in South Africa, we didn’t find
them in a lot of other places.
On top of that we have other groups like these animals called Pseudosuchians, which are big
fossil reptiles that are quite closely related to crocs.
And In one of our quarries we found this amazing five meter long Pseudosuchian predator.
You can imagine this thing as being a bit like a small T. Rex, but it walks on all fours.
It's the biggest predator that we’ve found in the ecosystem; we’re pretty sure it would
have been eating the dinosaurs.
And we also have small animals that includes early relatives of mammals.
>>MENG: For many years, we know that South Africa have so many of these beautifully preserved
specimens of mammal-like reptiles.
But it’s kind of one step short of the origin of mammals.
This time, we find one lower jaw, it’s very small.
And in the field, when I saw that specimen, to me at least I think that’s the most important
discovery at that moment, and that trip.
I know that from my knowledge this is something very close to mammal.
It’s not quite a mammal yet, but that’s what we’re looking for.
Before this, we don’t know there’s such animal exists.
But now we have that clue.
>>CHOINIERE: The fossils we’ve collected at Qhemegha are reposited at Wits University
for now.
There’s a lot of community support to build either a museum or an interpretive center
here in Qhemegha, and the local people and interested tourists and other members of the
South African and sort of global paleo community could come here and look at them.
>>RALANE: This is a world class thing.
We would like to see this museum in a world-class setting.
>>BENSON: The material’s become really important in training South African students in paleontology
with genuinely new, exciting material that’s telling us a great deal abo v ut the evolutionary
history of life on Earth.
Paleontologists could work in this area for many decades to come, still continuing to
make new discoveries.