August 31 , 2016

by Shaena Montanari

Jonah Choiniere is a paleontologist who lives for fieldwork—which is why when he was hired as a lecturer in dinosaur paleontology at University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa he was excited to pack up his life in New York and head to a new continent of unexplored territory that is tantalizingly full of fossils.

“Friday afternoon I can load up a truck and drive somewhere and Saturday morning be collecting fossils,” he tells me, also mentioning sometimes the field sites are not only chock full of dinosaurs, but elephants and the occasional lion.

Choiniere is a long way from the northeast US where he grew up and worked for most of his life. Now, as a Reader at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the university, he spends his time combing the area around Johannesburg for new fossil finds, which he has already stared amassing.

He is just one paleontologist in a long history of illustrious researchers who have taken to the breathtakingly beautiful lands of South Africa to uncover fossils not only of dinosaurs, but extinct mammals and reptiles. “South Africa has this really long paleontological history. They were collecting dinosaurs here in the 1840s,” Choiniere mentions, talking about fossils discovered here that were shipped to the UK for study. “The dinosaur Massospondylus from South Africa was described by Sir Richard Owen in the 1850s.”

“Apartheid destroyed the progress,” Choiniere explains. It wasn’t until more recently the government started really funding paleontology. Now, the institute Choiniere works at is supported by a government Center of Excellence in Paleosciences grant. The country invests money into paleontology and sees it as a unique feature of South Africa that should be promoted.

The South African government, represented by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the National Research Foundation (NRF), was able to buy a small stake in the European Synchrotron Research Facility where researchers like Choiniere can spend time getting unprecedented views of 200 million year old fossils. Just this summer he was in France scanning a magnificent specimen of the dinosaur Heterodontosaurus. “It’s from the Upper Elliot Formation, so it is about 200 million years old. It looks like it was in a very fine-grained debris flow. It was found by one of my colleagues on the side of the road in a stream.”

The Elliot Formation produces many dinosaurs and seems to straddle the Triassic/Jurassic boundary. Examining the Heterodontosaurus from this formation has revealed interesting characteristics of its skull bones and teeth that could not be seen without this special type of imaging.

Choiniere’s group also has more exciting findings coming soon, including a giant sauropodomorph that was discovered years ago by famous South African fossil collector James Kitching. “It looks like it is about 14 tons, more than twice the size of the next largest sauropodomorph.”

The paleontologists at the Evolutionary Studies Institute will continue scanning fossils for comparative purposes, thanks to a government equipment grant. “One of the best things that happened was that our department got a CT scanner,” Choiniere says. Steadily they have been CT scanning the entire collection—leading to important discoveries like the appearance of mammalian whiskers in the fossil record.

With miles of wide open outcrop to explore and a collection full of unstudied fossils, the world should expect this renaissance to continue for years to come.