Photos: Excavating a 200 million year old crocodile ancestor in South Africa
In recent years, South Africa has become a top destination for dinosaur hunters. Three years ago a palaeontology student noticed some fossilised bones sticking out of a massive rock on the remote Heelbo farm on the outskirts of Rosendal, South Africa. Today, a team of scientists is painstakingly zeroing in on a 200-million-year-old ancestor of the modern-day crocodile. Jonah Choiniere and his team from Johannesburg's Witwatersrand University had tracked the reptile from another age for three years. The delicate excavation process at the site is grindingly slow and continues today.
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Johannesburg Witwatersrand University professor Jonah Choiniere grinds stones containing fossils on the outskirts of Rosendal, South Africa. As the sun rises over the South African bush, scientists laden with backpacks climbed up a hillside. They get down to work, carving into two immense blocks of stone that have concealed the secrets of an ancestor of modern-day crocodiles for some 200 million years. (Gianluigi Guercia / AFP)
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Professor Choiniere looks for fossils in the rock formations at the Heelbo farm. “In 2015, one of my students just saw a few (fossilised) bones coming out,” said Choiniere, his shirt sticking to sweat from the morning’s hike. The delicate excavation process at the site is grindingly slow and continues today. (Gianluigi Guercia / AFP)
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Jonah Choiniere and his team from Witwatersrand University had tracked the reptile from another age for three years. “We started to excavate it and we brought it back to the lab and it turned out to be a hip of a species we’ve never seen before,” said the palaeontologist, who is originally from the United States. (Gianluigi Guercia / AFP)
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“Two hundred and fifty to 200 million years ago, these animals were the dominant land carnivores and they were found all over the world... (but) in South Africa we don’t have a record of them,” research student Rick Tolchard said. “Some of them were, I imagine, sort of like a crocodile crossed with a lion, a very large quadrupedal, legs under the body, with these massive big jaws -- a very intimidating animal. (Gianluigi Guercia / AFP)
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