After almost a year of methodical work, the 'Barkly Pass' fossils have finally been extracted for research to be conducted at the Albany Museum in Grahamstown.
After almost a year of methodical work, the 'Barkly Pass' fossils have finally been extracted for research to be conducted at the Albany Museum in Grahamstown.
“It’s being incorporated into a PhD study up at the Evolutionary Studies Institute (ESI) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Here a full review of all sauropod material from South Africa, which includes specimens from the Kirkwood Formation, will be studied,” said Dr Billy de Klerk, who was the first palaeontologist on site and has collected Kirkwood Formation material for the past 15 years.
The doctoral study is being supervised by Dr Jonah Choiniere of the ESI at Wits. According to De Klerk, this is perhaps the largest foot of any dinosaur discovered in South Africa.
The importance of the find relates to the dinosaur being part of “the beginnings of the development and evolution of the giants".
The extracted Elliot dinosaur fossils consist of tail bones, rib-like gastralia and the left back foot of what has been identified as a primitive long-tailed, long-necked dinosaur in the broad family of plant-eating dinosaurs named Sauropodomorphs.
While the giants were likely to reach 25 meters in length, this dinosaur would have been some eight meters long with stumpy legs, a long neck and a long tail that swung in the air instead of being dragged along the ground.
Sauropodomorphs were herbivores and these fossils date to about 200 million years at the boundary between the upper Triassic and lower Jurassic Period.
“When the Sauropodomorphs started to appear in the fossil record they were quite small, that was in the early Jurassic, but by the middle of the Jurassic Period (160 Ma) they had evolved to be truly gigantic animals,” De Klerk said.
This dinosaur specimen was discovered near the top of the Barkly Pass by Johan Erasmus in 2010.
De Klerk and his team were called in by the farmer Selby Vorster, and the excavation took place in two sessions, with the second being completed during November last year.
Once the study is complete, the fossils will be displayed in the Albany History Museum.
