Digging the Dinosaur Fossils of South Africa

[MUSIC]

[The sun rises over a mountainous landscape.]

ROGER BENSON (Curator, Division of Paleontology): We came down to this site and there were literally–

[Birds-eye view of five paleontologists excavating fossils in a quarry.]

BENSON: –bones falling out of the hills all over the place. Almost everywhere we go,

[BENSON appears on screen, speaking to camera.]

BENSON: we can excavate bones of all kinds of different animals–

[A hand uses a large broom-like brush to brush dirt and sand away from a large bone.]

BENSON: –predatory theropod dinosaurs, long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs,

[Close-up of a small tooth embedded in rock, circled with red paint. Another pile of rocks sits nearby.]

BENSON: –jaws and teeth of small mammals and their relatives, other extinct groups of fossil reptiles.

[Rows and rows of bags of fossils sit on a table in an office.]

BENSON: In South Africa, in the Late Triassic, almost everything we’ve found is new.

[A person leans over a partially prepared fossil, drizzling glue over it.]

BENSON: In fact, we haven’t found anything that was previously known before.

[The American Museum of Natural History’s logo appears. A title appears over shots of paleontologists working in a rocky and hilly landscape: “Digging the Dinosaur Fossils of South Africa, Constantine S. Niarchos Expedition”. One of the paleontologists is BENSON. Closeup of him looking at a large flat rock on the side of a hill.]

BENSON: Right now I’m on an expedition to South Africa, and we’re looking for–

[BENSON reappears on screen, speaking to camera. Text appears: “Roger Benson, Macaulay Curator, Division of Paleontology”]

BENSON: –dinosaurs, and the other animals that lived alongside them more than 200 million years ago in the Late Triassic.

[BENSON looks at a rock and passes it to another paleontologist.]

BENSON: 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 appears on screen, speaking to camera. Text appears: “Jonah Choiniere, Professor, University of Witwatersrand”]

JONAH CHOINIERE (Professor, University of Witwatersrand): We’re here in the village of Qhemegha, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa,

[Flying upward, a mountainous landscape and small village are revealed behind a hill. On top of this, a map of South Africa draws onto the screen. At the very southeast corner of the border of Lesotho and South Africa, a star appears and the name Qhemegha appears next to it.]

CHOINIERE: –right on the border of the Orange River where it dumps out of the highlands of Lesotho, and we’re sitting actually–

[Shots of layers of rock in the landscape.]

CHOINIERE: –on rocks that were laid down in the early Jurassic period, about 200 million years ago.

[A bone-white fossil, slightly fractured, sits partially exposed on the ground.]

CHOINIERE: And we can see fossils actually coming out of the ground.

[MENG JIN appears on screen, speaking to the camera. Text appears: “Meng Jin, Curator, Division of Paleontology”]

MENG JIN (Curator, Division of Paleontology): This year is my first opportunity to do field work in Africa.

[The camera flies over paleontologists working in a fossil quarry at the base of a large hill.]

MENG: It’s a new place to me, and it’s basically it’s dinosaur site.

[A paleontologist sits cracking open small rocks with a rock hammer and inspecting the contents.]

MENG: I work on fossil mammals. Finding a small mammal is quite different.

[A tiny fossil jaw, white against the dark surrounding rock, is revealed.]

MENG: The age of the rock that we are looking at,

[MENG reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

MENG: –that’s about the time mammals originated.

[A hand places a rock on top of a pile of other rocks.]

MENG: And that sediment will likely contain–

[A paleontologist looks at a very small rock between his forefinger and thumb. A closeup shows a tiny piece of fossil bone sticking out of the rock.]

MENG: –the fossils that will be the first mammals.

[A paleontologist sits on a rock, inspecting small rock fragments. BENSON reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

BENSON: We were originally called to work here by the local community,

[We fly slowly over the houses of the village of Qhemegha.]

BENSON: and they’ve been hugely supportive of what we’re doing.

CHOINIERE: There’s a core group of what they call

[CHOINIERE reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

CHOINIERE: community pioneers here. And probably the chief among these community pioneers is a man named Sginyane Ralane.

[A man, SGINYANE RALANE, appears on screen working in a fossil quarry. Text appears: “Sginyane Ralane, Community pioneer, Qhemegha”]

CHOINIERE: He goes by Sgi. So Sgi was present when the first fossils were found, and he recognized them as ancient animals.

[The screen fades to black, then fades up on a photo of RALANE standing next to a tray of fossil bones.]

SGINYANE RALANE (Community pioneer, Qhemegha Village) (Translated from Xhosa): We found them in 2015…

[A photo appears of another villager, Dumangwe Thyobeka.]

RALANE: A man called Dumangwe Tyhobeka–

[RALANE appears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

RALANE: –was the first person to find these bones and he came and told me. I’m lucky we found them in my lifetime.

[A photo appears of CHOINIERE speaking to RALANE out in the mountainous landscape, with two other officials.]

RALANE: Jonah came with a group and prospect the whole area,

[A photo of CHOINIERE, RALANE, and a few other paleontologists sitting on the ground in front of a big face of rock, smiling.]

RALANE: –then they agreed that it was rich in fossils.

[RALANE reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

RALANE: That was the first time when we knew that this was a dino grave- gravesite.

[BENSON reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

BENSON: So we don’t know why there are so many bones here.

[BENSON excavates fossils from the rocks, smiling.]

BENSON: But we sure know there are a lot of fossils.

[With [HAMMERING] in the background, we see various tools of paleontology: brushes, hammers, and picks.]

CHOINIERE: We spend a lot of time on the landscape–

[CHOINIERE reappears on screen speaking to the camera.]

CHOINIERE: –really just walking with our heads hunched over, looking at the ground.

[Paleontologists walk across a rocky valley between hills, looking for fossils.]

CHOINIERE: We’re lucky here in Qhemegha because there’s just so many bones, that we quite often find something.

[CHOINIERE reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

CHOINIERE: In fact, every day we find a new fossil.

[HAMMERS TAPPING]

[A white fossil tooth comes into focus amongst the surrounding rock, followed by a less visible fossil, circled with white chalk on the rock face. A paleontologist stands backlit against the sky, inspecting a piece of rock.]

BENSON: Sometimes all we find is the stuff on the surface.

[A chisel chips away at the rock to the side of a large fossil.]

BENSON: But oftentimes we find that there are bones going into the rock.

[A drone shot circles around paleontolists as they work in a quarry.]

BENSON: So in these cases, we can spend weeks and months carefully excavating, digging a quarry.

[A paleontologist leans over a chisel, pounding it in between two sections of rock.]

BENSON: The goal of the quarry is to dig around those bones,

[Paleontologists’ hands rub wet, plaster-soaked pieces of burlap over rock.]

BENSON: and make field jackets out of plaster and burlap that protect the bones
[A paleontologists stands next to a large plaster-covered fossil jacket, which is almost as long as the paleontologist is tall.]

BENSON: so we can transport them back to the prep lab,

[BENSON, CHOINIERE, and a fossil preparator look at an opened fossil jacket and pick carefully at the fossils inside with small tools.]

BENSON: and then there carefully, under controlled conditions, excavate the bones from the rock.

[Closeups of some more fully excavated and prepared fossils in the prep lab. CHOINIERE reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

CHOINIERE: All the fossils here tell us a bigger picture, which is change in Earth ecosystem over the time.

[CHOINIERE fades out and is replaced by an illustration of all the continents of Earth. The continents start to converge towards each other in the center, eventually forming a large land mass.]

CHOINIERE: In the Triassic, all of Earth’s continents are glued together into a single giant super continent,

[Text appears on the illustrated landmass: “Pangaea”]

CHOINIERE: which we call Pangaea.

[Yellow circles with silhouettes of long-necked dinosaurs inside pop up on the landmass.]

CHOINIERE: They show ecosystems where dinosaurs aren’t the dominant animals.

[Green pentagons with the silhouette of a large lizard-like animal pop up and quickly overwhelm and cover the landmass, with the yellow dinosaur circles barely visible beneath.]

CHOINIERE: In fact, it’s mainly things that are related to crocs.

[The circles and pentagons fade away from the illustrated landmass. It starts to split in the middle, allowing the ocean through.]

CHOINIERE: 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,

[The shadows of North America and South America flash on either side of the rift, and then the same for Europe and Africa. The rift is happening with North America and Europe on the north side of the rift, and South America and Africa on the south side of the rift.]

CHOINIERE: and that occurs between North and South America, and Europe and Africa.

[Along this rift, red and orange lava bubbles up.]

CHOINIERE: There’s a huge amount of lava that pours out on the Earth’s surface,

[A bubble pops up with cartoon dark clouds inside it.]

CHOINIERE: and this lava releases greenhouse gases,

[Another bubble pops up with cartoon ocean waves turning from blue to teal green.]

CHOINIERE: and it also changes the chemistry of the ocean.

[The icons of dinosaurs and crocodile ancestors reappear over the landmass.]

CHOINIERE: The animals that are on land are facing

[A bubble appears with a thermometer, where its temperature appears to be dropping.]

CHOINIERE: shifts in global temperature,

[Another bubble appears with raindrops falling.]

CHOINIERE: or rapid fluctuations in maybe seasonal rainfall, and they can’t adapt,

[The pentagon shapes containing crocodile ancestor silhouettes disappear from the landmass. Only the dinosaur yellow circles remain.]

CHOINIERE: and they go extinct. And suddenly there’s a shift,

[More and more dinosaur circles appear on the landmass, completely covering it.]

CHOINIERE: and all of a sudden everything we find is a dinosaur, and it’s very rare to find these croc line animals.

[BENSON reappears on screen speaking to the camera.]

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.

[The camera zooms out and over some paleontologists working on a hillside outcrop, showing the rest of the mountainous landscape.]

BENSON: So by studying the fossils here, we hope to get a much more clear picture of the End-Triassic mass extinction event.

[The sun shines on a river weaving its way through the landscape. On top of this, an illustration showing layers of rocks containing fossil skulls appear.]

BENSON: Because this area preserves an almost continuous sequence of rocks

[At the bottom of this illustration, text appears: “Late Triassic (214 million years ago)”]

BENSON: that starts in the latest Triassic

[At the top of this illustration, text appears: “Early Jurassic (200 million years ago)”]

BENSON: and ends in the early Jurassic.

[A thick line draws itself through the middle of the illustrated rock layers, and a label appears pointing to it, with text that reads: “End-Triassic Mass Extinction, 201 million years ago”]

BENSON: So, spanning this mass extinction event, and by getting fossils from this area,

[Closeups of fossils in an office. In the background, CHOINIERE and BENSON inspect the fossils.]

BENSON: we’ll get a really clear understanding of what species were around just before the event, and who went extinct during the event.

[BENSON reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

BENSON: There were several different types of dinosaurs living on the landscape in the late Triassic here.

[An illustration of a large, long-necked dinosaur appears, with large muscular front arms. A label appears pointing to it: “Sauropodamorph”]

BENSON: So we’ve got Sauropodomorphs. The Sauropodomorphs are the early cow-sized relatives of the Sauropod dinosaurs.

[An illustration of a slightly fuzzy or fluffy dinosaur with a long skull with sharp teeth appears. A label pointing to it reads: “Theropod”]

BENSON: 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.

[An illustration of a large, stocky reptile standing over a kill and baring its teeth at something offscreen.]

BENSON: On top of that we have other groups

[A wider shot of the same illustration, where another large bipedal reptile is staring at the previous animal. A label pointing to both animals reads: “Pseudosuchian”]

BENSON: –like these animals called Pseudosuchians, which are big fossil reptiles that are quite closely related to crocs. And In one of our quarries,

[A photo of several plaster jackets containing fossils, in a line, with people working next to them showing the size of all the pieces together.]

BENSON: we found this amazing five meter long Pseudosuchian predator.

[The camera goes in and out of focus on a prepared fossil claw sitting on a table.]

BENSON: You can imagine this thing as being a bit like a small T. rex,

[A row of fossil teeth is partially exposed inside a fossil jacket.]

BENSON: but it walks on all fours.

[BENSON reappears on screen, speaking to the camera, smiling.]

BENSON: It's the biggest predator that we’ve found in the ecosystem; we’re pretty sure it would have been eating the dinosaurs.

[An illustration of two fuzzy animals with front fangs and claws, sitting on a tree stump. A label pointing to them reads: “Mammal ancestor”]

BENSON: And we also have small animals that includes early relatives of mammals.

[MENG reappears on screen speaking to the camera.]

MENG: For many years, we know that South Africa have so many of these

[Archival photos of a fossil case at the American Museum of Natural History, with the title inside the case of “Mammal-like Reptiles of South Africa.”]

MENG: beautifully preserved specimens of mammal-like reptiles. But it’s kind of one step short of the origin of mammals.

[MENG reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

MENG: This time, we find one lower jaw, it’s very small.

[Photos of MENG and another paleontologist looking at a small rock with a hand lens on the side of a hill.]

MENG: And in the field, when I saw that specimen, to me at least I think that’s the most important discovery,

[MENG reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

MENG: at that moment, and that trip.

[Slowly zooming out on a photo of two pieces of rock, and a collection bag with a date and location. The rock has a barely visible fossil jaw in it.]

MENG: I know that from my knowledge this is something very close to mammal.

[MENG reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

MENG: It’s not quite a mammal yet, but that’s what we’re looking for.

[Paleontologists excavate fossils on the side of tall hill, with mountains in the background.]

MENG: Before this, we don’t know there’s such animal exists. But now we have that clue.

[The screen fades to black momentarily, before fading up on rows of fossils inside paleontologist collections space, with a sign reading “Sauropodamorpha”. Text appears: “University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa”]

CHOINIERE: The fossils we’ve collected at Qhemegha are reposited at Wits University for now.

[The front façade of a building at the University of Witwatersrand, with big columns and white and blue banners draping down.]

CHOINIERE: There’s a lot of community support to build

[CHOINIERE and BENSON work inside the collections at the University of Witwatersrand.]

CHOINIERE: 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

[CHOINIERE reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

CHOINIERE: global paleo community could come here and look at them.

[RALANE reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

RALANE: This is a world class thing.

[The camera flies over the landscape of Qhemegha, nestled in the mountain and river valley.]

RALANE: We would like to see this museum in a world-class setting.

[Paleontologists sit in a quarry and hit rocks with hammers and chisels, looking for fossils.]

BENSON: The material’s become really important

[BENSON shows something to two paleontology students on the side of a hill.]

BENSON: in training South African students in paleontology with genuinely new,

[A paleontology student looks at a rock through a hand lens.]

BENSON: exciting material that’s telling us a great deal about

[A fossil with a label “COR1” on it in marker comes into focus.]

BENSON: the evolutionary history of life on Earth.

[BENSON reappears on screen, speaking to the camera.]

BENSON: Paleontologists could work in this area for many decades to come,

[Paleontologists excavate a quarry in a riverbed, just beyond a rocky overhang.]

BENSON: –still continuing to make new discoveries.

[Credits roll.

The Constantine S. Niarchos Expedition featured here was generously supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

Producer

Lee Stevens

Additional Camera

ABEOD / Hermanus Gerber

Music

“New Adventures” by Thomas Louis James White (PRS) & Llywelyn Gruffudd (PRS) / Warner/Chappell Production Music

“Travelling Light” by Troy Marcus William Hewson (PRS) / Warner/Chappell Production Music

“Ivory Pearls” by Datolite Mine (ASCAP) / Warner/Chappell Production Music

“Journeys to You” by Rik Carter (PRS) / Warner/Chappell Production Music

Images/Archival

AMNH Library

Bailey Weiss

Brett Eloff

Jonah Choiniere

Viktor Radermacher

Zhao Chuang

Special Thanks

Sigudu Camping and BnB

Eastern Cape Provincial Heritage Resources Agency

Rooiwal Tribal Leadership Council as represented by Headman SM Mokhanya

Qhemegha Village Leadership Council

Eastern Cape Department of Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture (DSRAC) ]

[END MUSIC]