fossils
Ellen Barlett
James Kitching is really retired now, he says his days in the field are over. As he says it, he looks across the room, toward his wife. They exchange glances in the accommodating way of the long- married, then she sighs. One gets the feeling neither believes it.
Moments later – talking about erosion, its role in exposing fossils – he produces what appears to be a large rock, the size of a pumpkin, flattened and vaguely triangular. “The other day I collected this,” he says.
It is the skull of a gorgonopsian, a sabre- toothed carnivore that lived more than 200- million years ago. He found it lying on the ground, on a farm in the Murraysberg district. “I missed this one in 1957,” he says, “so it’s a bit damaged.”
He looks at the skull with a measure of disappointment, as if he were personally responsible for the damage, because he failed to see the skull 41 years ago. Perhaps it is because he has missed so little.
In his almost 50 year association with the Bernard Price Institute (BPI) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Kitching was its chief fossil collector, as well as its director from 1984 until his retirement in 1990. More than 90% of the fossils in the BPI’s considerable collection were found by him.
Kitching specialised in therapsids, the order of animals that more than 200-million years ago gave rise to our earliest mammalian ancestors. The Karoo is the richest repository in the world of their fossils. The layers of rock that once underlay the central South African plain, known collectively among scientists as the Karoo Supergroup, contain the longest uninterrupted fossil record of therapsids and their reptile predecessors in the world.
Kitching’s contribution may be best illustrated by an enormous wall map at the BPI. Extending north and east from around Prince Albert to the Drakensberg, is a wide band bristling with tens of thousands of push pins of all colours, each one representing a fossil found by Kitching.
His colleagues have estimated he walked the equivalent of three times round the world in search of Karoo fossils, but Kitching dismisses that. He says it’s probably closer to only once around the world.
“I have never in my life counted how many fossils I have found … I have got a record somewhere, but I don’t know where the record is,” he says. He’s impatient with such questions. It would be like trying to count the hairs on your head, both pointless and impossible.
Born and reared in the remote Karoo town of Nieu Bethesda, better known today as the retreat of Athol Fugard and site of the Owl House, the man who would become one of the world’s leading palaeontologists did not finish high school, but trained instead to be a car mechanic.
It had not occurred to him that there was an option. Palaeontology in the 1930s and 1940s was largely the practise of a handful of educated eccentrics. Kitching was the son of a road builder, one of eight children of a working class rural family.
But his father was a naturalist, too, and as a small boy Kitching would accompany him on long walks in the veld, listening as he talked about the mysteries and wonder of nature around them. His father also was a friend of Robert Broom, a pioneer of palaeontology in South Africa. Broom had a knack for knowing value when he saw it. He recognised in both Kitchings a rare talent for fossil spotting, and whenever he was in the area would stop by to see what they had found.
“My dad and Broom used to sit in the garage having arguments about what is what, and who is what, and I thought those two, well they are just nuts. And little did I know then that I would also go nuts,” Kitching says.
In 1945, Broom got Wits to hire the young Kitching as a technical officer for the brand new BPI, assigned to hunt for fossils in the Karoo and fill the institute’s new and still empty strong rooms. Kitching started in the Graaff-Reinet district, revisiting the places where he had accompanied his father as a young boy.
For the next 40 years or so, he spent three to four months of every year in the veld, searching for fossils over thousands of square miles.
It was not an easy life. But though he would stay out for months at a time, he remained a believer in the comforts of home. He liked fresh bread, so he baked his own, using anthills as ovens, or a hole in the ground if there were no anthills handy. He replanted carrots, and picked them as needed; learned how to keep meat fresh for days underground.
“When I grew up as a kid, where was the fridge?” he says. “Outside, in a hole, with brick and cinders inbetween.”
Kitching’s field work was unparalleled in both its quality and quantity. In 1973 he became only the second person in Wits history to be awarded a PhD without any previous academic qualifications; in 1984 he was named director of the Institute.
“It was a life’s work,” he says, with typical understatement.
Kitching’s respect and obvious affection for Broom did not stop him from cutting a swath through much of Broom’s early therapsid work. Broom had a habit of naming new species as soon as he found them, Kitching was among those who had most of them removed from the records.
“I sank so many of his species,” he says, with some rue. “He named a fossil Kitchingia, after the Kitching family. I sank that.”
Kitching was among the first to point out that what some thought were new species, were existing ones distorted from hundreds of millions of years in the ground.
“My argument was always, looking at the Karoo, looking at the sediments, sitting in streams in the hills, one area would never sustain that number of species, whatever happened.”
The harshness of the places he once sought fossils – the Karoo, the Antarctic – taught him a few lessons about the survival of his own species.
“The most amazing thing to me is the adaptation of the human body. There I was in the Antarctic, minus 40. Within, you can say, one week, that was summer. Minus 25 was a hot day …
“Here, in the Karoo, when it is in the 40s and 50s, one thing you mustn’t do is stop. You must never stop and sit down, unless you get to a bush or somewhere where there’s a bit of shade. You must never sit and say it’s hopeless, I can’t go on any more, it’s too hot. You’ll be dead.”