Professor Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan is a cool mom. She knows more than most people on the planet do about dinosaurs. And that pleases her two sons, aged six and eight tremendously, because having a palaeobiologist handy whenever you need one to settle an argument over just how big Tyrannosaurus rex really was is always a good thing!
Recognition for her work is something that extends beyond her family. Chinsamy-Turan is giving the keynote lecture at the official opening ceremony of Sasol SciFest 2005, which is no small achievement for this Pretoria-born scientist. Especially when you learn that she never considered palaeontology as a career.
‘I was at the University of the Witwatersrand, studying zoology,” she explains. ‘In the third year of my studies I did an optional module in palaeontology and enjoyed it so much that the next year when I did honours in zoology, I again took the optional palaeontology module, and at the end of the year I took a temporary job in the palaeontology department. I then went on and did my masters and PhD.”
But Chinsamy-Turan’s background in zoology helped her to become more of a specialist in her chosen field and took her on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in the United States, then to Iziko Museums of Cape Town (where she served as specialist scientist, and later director), to her current position at the University of Cape Town’s department of zoology.
‘I’m a palaeobiologist,” she says. ‘I’m fascinated by form and function and how extinct animals developed and interacted with their environment.”
Which has led to her becoming a global expert on the microscopic structure of dinosaur bones.
‘Bone microstructure — that is, the microscopic structure of bone (only visible under the microscope) — holds vital clues to unravelling the biology of dinosaurs and other extinct animals. It tells you how they grew, and about the factors that affected their growth. One can directly compare fossilised bones with present-day animal bones, and biological signatures present in the bone can be studied. These reflect various factors of an animal’s life, its diet and growth patterns, for example. Bone structure can give a good indication of the age an animal was when it died and can also reveal much about its life, when it experienced growth spurts, whether its growth was affected by seasonal conditions, whether it was sick or injured,” says Chinsamy-Turan.
She is the only established researcher in her field in South Africa and is part of a select international group of people studying bone microstructure. There are only three main laboratories carrying out similar research — Chinsamy- Turan’s in South Africa, and one each in the US and Europe.
What makes the microstructure of extinct animal bones so compelling?
‘It’s a wonderful way to understand the biology of extinct animals,” explains Chinsamy-Turan, who has studied a range of animals, from dinosaurs, birds (Early Mesozoic) to mammal-like reptiles, as well as some of the earliest known (Late Jurassic and Mesozoic) mammals in the world. In South Africa we are lucky enough to have a good stock of the remains of mammal-like reptiles, known as non-mammalian therapsids. Studies of these ancestors of mammals have provided much information about the evolution of mammals and the development of mammalian characteristics, and now our work has led to a better understanding of their biology,” she explains.
It is quite an unusual line of work for a woman, and even more remarkable when you understand that Chinsamy-Turan was born at the height of the apartheid era into an Indian family.
She was born in the Wonderboom area of Pretoria and shortly afterwards her family was forced to move to Laudium, west of the city, where she grew up.
‘I was lucky in that I had a very liberated family as far as Indian society goes. My father (as in most Indian families) was a tremendous influence and both he and my mother valued education highly. I have two sisters and my father was firm that his three daughters should be well educated to overcome the barriers of being black in South Africa, and being women in an Indian society. He always stressed that his girls should be able to support themselves and not have to rely on a man to be successful or financially secure. It was a fantastic upbringing, and allowed my sisters and I to be where we are today”, she explains.
Chinsamy-Turan is championing the cause of bringing women, and especially black women, into the science arena.
‘The number of us is increasing and it’s fantastic for the sciences and bodes well for the future potential of science and research in South Africa,” she says, adding that South Africa is leading the field in attracting women to science.
‘Our National Research Foundation is channelling a lot of time and money into programmes to attract women into sciences, and then there are awards such as the National Science and Technology Forum awards, and the DST Women in Science Awards, that also serve to raise the profile of women in science.”
Chinsamy-Turan is no stranger to awards herself — she was a finalist in the Department of Science and Technology awards last year and in 2003 won the National Science and Technology Award for Outstanding Contributions to Science. She has also been the recipient of the Royal Society of South Africa Gold Medal for Research Excellence (1997 to 1998) and the National Research Foundation President’s Award for research excellence (1995 to 2000).
She has also published extensively, both in international scientific journals and in the popular press, and she is the author of The Microstructure of Dinosaur Bone, a soon to be published book by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Indeed, the popular press and in particular popular science-fiction has played its role in attracting young blood to the sciences, and especially palaeontology.
And Hollywood has had a part to play in making it a hot topic to study with the Jurassic Park movies and series such as Walking with Dinosaurs and Walking with Beasts bringing her field of research into the living rooms of Joe Public.
‘Films and series like that, while not exactly 100% accurate, are wonderful ways of introducing people to palaeontology and interesting them in finding out more about it,” says Chinsamy-Turan.
At the moment she is involved in some exciting areas of research and will soon be working with an Argentinian palaeontological team on a pterosaur project, finding out more about these flying reptiles.
‘I love my work,” she says, enthusiastically. ‘It’s really interesting stuff. I come in for some mild criticism from my more mainstream palaeontology colleagues because rather than keep fossil bones under wraps in drawers and cupboards I section them to find out more about them as living animals. Unfortunately it does mean destroying the bones in the process, but you get so much information about an extinct animal out of the microscopic structure of its bones. It’s amazing, and it makes the sacrifice worthwhile.”
Chinsamy-Turan doesn’t go on digs so much now, because of her young family, but says that in South Africa there are some outstanding areas of palaeontological interest. There are still many fossils to be discovered in the heart of South Africa in the Karoo basin, and also in the Algoa basin — the Cretaceous beds around Kirkwood in the Eastern Cape. It was from these Kirkwood fossil beds, that a new dinosaur, called Nqwebasaurus thwazi, was found. Its name means ‘fast runner from Kirkwood” — Thwazi being the local name for the area — and it is a small carnivore, approximately 1m long, which ran upright on its hind legs. It is also interesting to note that the first stegosaur ever unearthed was found in the Kirkwood area.
It may not add up to much for a lot of people — digging around and finding bones millions of years old, but put into perspective, the work that Chinsamy-Turan does is just as relevant as the more traditional sciences such as physics and chemistry.
‘One of the best things about the work I do is that it is vital in helping us to understand evolutionary processes,” she points out. ‘We cannot begin to explain where we are now and where we are going if we don’t know where we have come from and how we got here.”
Professor Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan will be giving her lecture, Unravelling the Biology of Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Animals, at the official opening ceremony of Sasol SciFest 2005 at 6.30pm on Friday March 18 at the Monument Guy Butler Theatre