Johannesburg - Jonah Choiniere opens the red box like he’s uncovering a secret. In a way, he is, except this one is ancient – it’s 200 million years old.
He takes out the clutch of six fossilised eggs, entombed in a glinting, metallic rock bed.
“They’re gorgeous, aren’t they?” South Africa’s dinosaur specialist asks, gingerly holding the first dinosaur embryos found in South Africa, and the oldest in the world, like a prize.
Stored in a locked room stacked with dinosaur fossils, and hidden at the back of another room is where Wits University keeps its most prized dinosaur specimens.
“You can see an egg here and an embryo curled up inside,” Choiniere says of the small, curled embryonic skeletons. “We thought this was a nest, but then we went back to Clarens, in then Free State, and we found out it was a piece of a nest of 30 dinosaur eggs.”
More than 30 years after fossil hunter James Kitching unearthed the first tiny clutch of fossilised eggs along the side of the road, Choiniere, a senior researcher in dinosaur palaeontology at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits, and his colleagues, packed them in an attaché case and took them to Grenoble, in France, two weeks ago.
“I looked like I was smuggling millions,” laughs the 36-year-old, of French-Canadian descent.
There, a powerful CT scanner at the European Synchrotron Facility was able to peer through the rock and at the precious embryos of Massospondylus – a 5m herbivore – buried in them. After all these years, it’s the first stage of data collection.
They also brought the skull of Big Mama, another famous South African Massospondylus fossil, to be examined at the Grenoble facility.
“Imagine putting this through an X-ray scanner! It’s like a skull grinning back,” Choiniere smiles.
“I told the customs officials it’s a 200 million-year-old dinosaur and she’s going for a medical check-up.
“The funny thing is, the stewards told me she could be used a weapon and that I needed to store her in the hold.
“I told them I would rather chain the box to my wrist.
“We stored it in the overhead compartment.”
Processing the data from the embryos will take months, but Choiniere and his team can’t wait to hatch the secrets.
“It’s really the cradle to the grave. We have the smallest ones and, with Big Mama, the skull of the biggest one,” says the scientist, who ventures that the eggs were probably laid in a floodplain and submerged in a late-season Early Jurassic flood.
But how did Choiniere and his team find dinosaur remains in the first place? By using geological maps – Kitching’s are tacked to the wall of his fossil-filled office – and, increasingly, predictive models using geographic information systems.
Wits, which boasts the largest collection of dinosaur fossils in South Africa, runs a state-of-the-art laboratory that is complete with its own sophisticated CT scanner and 3D printer and which Choiniere says compares with the best in the world.
Teams of fossil-preparation crews painstakingly and delicately drill through heaps of gigantic rocks, scouring them for fossilised remains.
“We don’t remove the fossils on site or the bones would disintegrate. We take as much of the tombstone as possible and bring it back to this controlled environment, where we can do the professional-level work using rock saws and brute force. It’s glacially slow work.”
Choiniere spends about 10 weeks a year in the field – his predecessors would spend almost the entire year.
“It’s a bit of a roller coaster, a treadmill. You find something and then, five years later, you’re ready to study it… So much of what we do is comparative. We take the remains of an animal we don’t know, compare it to animals we do know, and say, ‘How does it differ?’ “
Sometimes, things fall through the cracks. To illustrate this, Choiniere shows the cross-shaped ankle of the Sefapanosaurus, named for the Sotho word sefapano, meaning “cross”.
Last week, Wits, UCT and Argentina’s Museo de la Plata announced this was among the remains of a herbivorous dinosaur, thought to be Aardonyx, collected in the 1930s and hidden in a storeroom at Wits. That was until a team of visiting palaeontologists saw the bones didn’t match and that it was a new species.
“Really no one had time to look at it,” offers Choiniere, surrounded by tables of fossilised remains, one labelled “mystery s***” by a student.
“Eventually, things just start slipping through the cracks. We just don’t have enough time in the day, or enough researchers, or students… The comparative work can takes years – it doesn’t happen overnight.”
But chance discoveries like these help show how diverse ecosystems were 200 million years ago.
Choiniere came to South Africa in 2008, fascinated by the country’s little-known dinosaur heritage – now he has made the country his home.
He wants South Africans to become as enamoured of their dinosaur wonders as he is.
“I’m making it my mission to remind everyone. I do a lot of public talks. I feel we have a scientific obligation to communicate our findings to the rest of the world, especially the public.
“I hope in the next five years we’ll be at the point where most people know about South Africa’s dinosaurs and then we can begin at a higher level of understanding – that now you know why they’re here, let me tell you why they’re so important. Why? Because heritage is not skin deep. Your heritage goes right down the centre of the earth from here.”
This year, Choiniere hopes, with his team, to announce the discovery of several new dinosaur species. He heads into another locked room and points to a red-coloured elbow.
“It’s the remains of the largest Karoo dinosaur ever found. We think this is a new species to science. The elbow is longer than my femur. This was a huge, huge animal. We’re calling it the Highland Giant, but we don’t have a name for it yet and we don’t want to curse it by giving it another dinosaur’s name.”
Alongside it, there’s another collection of bones – also possibly another species.
“These were excavated almost 10 years ago. It’s taken that long to excavate it. My predecessor excavated and I get to carry on the torch,” Choiniere smiles.
For South Africa’s dinosaur excavators, finding “Predator X” is the Holy Grail, he says. On his fossil-hunting expeditions in China’s Gobi desert, the young scientist discovered a new species of dinosaur, the Aorun zhaoi, which lived 160 million years ago.
“It’s a huge mystery. We have very few of those here, so few they’re in one room. We have a lot of their footprints, but not the skulls. That’s our holy grail – to find the big therapod making all these footprints.”
Would he watch the new Jurassic World movie?
“Movies like that are good. You just have to switch your scientist brain off,” he laughs.
Saturday Star