Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre

Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre, Nieu Bethesda.

© Chris Marais

• Email
• Tweet
• Print

The story of dinosaurs is writ large in human consciousness. But what came before them?

The Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre in the Karoo town of Nieu Bethesda tells the story of the ‘wildlife’ that roamed the great watered plains that were here 260-million years ago and more.

On the museum wall is a mural showing an otherworldly land. Where there is now semi-desert, the mural shows a land green, moist and full of ferns and cycads. Little herds of cynodonts (half mammal-half reptile creatures with doglike teeth) roam here and dicynodonts walk about cropping the vegetation with their beaky mouths and overgrown tusks.

Tiny diictodonts with their big eyes, tusks and parrot-like beaks lurk close to their burrows, casting anxious eyes at the scary gorgonopsian hovering at the edges.

The gorgonopsians were nightmarishly ugly predators, killers with the fangs to prove it. You’ll see a fossilised skull in the Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre, and a recreation of what it looked like (scary), along with other denizens of that time.

One of the more notable creatures was the Lystrosaurus. Not much larger than a rabbit, this burrowing creature was 1 of the very few species to survive the mysterious Permian extinction around 253-million years ago. The cause, whatever it was, was far more devastating than the giant meteor that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs about 188-million years later, about 65-million years ago.

The museum is named for James Kitching, one of the most astoundingly talented fossil hunters this world has ever seen.

When he was 7 years old, he discovered his 1st fossil, new to science. Later on, just after World War II, he collected no fewer than 200 fossil skulls in 5 months after he was commissioned for the task by the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Appropriately enough, this museum was started by the current head of that respected institute, Professor Bruce Rubidge, who was mentored by Kitching and his own fossil-hunting grandfather, Sidney Rubidge.