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## Tour
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tour.name = The Boonstra Dioramas
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## Media
### Title
album_6C07BE29_62B2_E584_41D5_440716122176.label = Bradysaurus becoming a Fossil
album_6C07BE29_62B2_E584_41D5_440716122176_0.label = Bradysaurus becoming a Fossil 1
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album_6CC608F7_62B2_6E8B_41D0_33EC410622A5.label = A One in a Million Chance
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## Popup
### Body
htmlText_50E8528C_7686_3B7F_4197_2E0E655665DA.html = Step 1: Finding, excavating and preparing
This is done by palaeontologists and specially-trained fossil finders who spend hours walking the slopes of the Karoo “koppies” looking for bones protruding from the rock. After carefully chiselling away the rock to expose the bones, they are coated with Plaster of Paris which hardens to form a rigid jacket in which the fossil stays until it reaches the laboratory. Here the fossil is prepared by a fossil preparator, who will use a dentist’s drill to remove as much of the surrounding rock as possible to finally expose all the bones.
Step 2: Casting the bones and mounting the skeleton
Once cleaned, the individual bones are cast in resin and mounted on a steel armature. The bones are placed in positions determined by looking at the shape of the joints and other articulation surfaces, as well as tendon scars that are still visible on the bone surface.
Step 3: Fleshing-out the skeleton
At this stage the skill of the model-maker brings the animal back to life.
Important soft tissue features such as skin folds, whiskers, eye colour and iris shape are all things that cannot be determined directly from the fossil, so they copy such details from modern reptiles like the iguana and monitor lizard.
A reconstruction of the skeleton of the extinct reptile Bradysaurus seeleyi as it may have appeared shortly before fossilization within layers of hardened mud and clay.
For skeletons to become fossils they have to be buried. Luckily, none of the scavengers living at the time had teeth that were strong enough to crunch Bradysaurus bones so the skeleton that they left behind on the lake shore is fairly undamaged.
During the wet season the lake expanded to cover the skeleton and silt and clay particles settled to form layers over the bones. It would take 5 years or so for a carcass of this size to be completely buried. During this time it can get trampled and weathered. However, provided it remains buried, it has a chance of becoming a fossil.
There is a one in a million chance that a skeleton becomes a fossil, and an even smaller chance, perhaps, one in a billion, that it gets discovered before it is eroded away. Those are the odds against finding a fossil like this fully articulated Bradysaurus skeleton, which was discovered by Dr Boonstra on a farm near Fraserburg in the Karoo.
He spotted the shoulder blades sticking out of the rock and used his geological pick to carefully uncover the rest of the skeleton and brought it back to the South African Museum encased in plaster of Paris.
Notice the peculiar grooves on the head shield – an indication that the skin was firmly attached to the roof skull. This was perhaps to help regulate body temperature, suggesting that this was still a cold-blooded reptile.
Dr Lieuwe Boonstra devoted his working life to the reptile fossils of the Great Karoo region of South Africa.
During the 45 years that he worked at the South African Museum (1927 – 1972), he found over 1200 specimens and published at least 50 scientific papers describing numerous new species of mammal-like reptiles. His passion for fossils went beyond simply writing about them – he wanted everyone to see what they really looked like.
It took Dr Boonstra and his colleagues over a decade to compose these elaborate scenes. They are based mainly on his own research findings and are a good indication of the general state of knowledge at the time.
Today, over 50 years later with the discovering of many more fossils, palaeontologists at the Iziko SA Museum are able to give a much more detailed picture of the life and times of the ancient Karoo. The latest information on the landscape, climate, vegetation and especially the behaviour of these long-extinct animals has now been incorporated into the exhibition called “Stone Bones” on the top floor above the Whale Well.
Riverside scene. The Mid-Permian Period around 260 million years ago was a time when all the southern continents were welded together in a single land mass known as Gondwana.
Mountains along the southern margin of the supercontinent formed the source of many large rivers that flowed northwards across a vast flat riverine plain. The climate was humid and vegetation flourished especially along the banks of the winding rivers. Glassopteris trees and bushes with large flat leaves dominated the riverbanks whereas horsetails and ferns grew on the floodplains.
In the foreground a fleet-footed Hopposaurus has spotted a well camouflaged Diictodon which was too slow to react when the rest of the colony went to ground.
The Diictodon has decided to crouch down to blend in with the background and hope that it won’t be noticed.
Bradysaurus (“robust reptile”) was a big, fat and slow-moving reptile.
It had an armour-plated skin, presumably as protection from predators. Its rows of small blunt teeth are thought to have been used to graze on aquatic vegetation around ponds and lakes. The bony lumps in its skin, called osteoderms, are nearly always found scattered around the fossil skeletons.
Animals are rarely fossilized with their skin intact, but there is an example on display in the “Stone Bones” exhibition which now allows us to make much more accurate reconstructions of what this animal looked like.
Scymnosaurus (shark-like reptile) was the largest of the therocephalian carnivores living in the Karoo during the Mid-Permian period. In this diorama it has just begun to scavenge a freshly killed Bradysaurus.
The neck is a common target for predators to quickly kill prey. However, despite its size, Scymnosaurus was still unlikely to have been able to bring down a healthy, full grown Bradysaurus. Its teeth were quite fragile – built for slicing and tearing rather than stabbing. If the prey was weak from being stuck in mud for days on end, it is possible that the scavenger could have started to feed before it had died.
260 million years ago (at least 60 million years before the dinosaurs), the South African Karoo regions were inhabited by a diverse array of land animals which were dominated by a long extinct groups of reptiles known as therapsids or “mammal-like reptiles”.
The two large therapsids on display are dinocephalians (meaning terrible head). They both have very thick bone on top of their skulls that was possibly an adaptation for head-butting.
On the left is Jonkeria and on the right Moschops. Both have long chisel shaped teeth used for grinding and slicing vegetation rather than meat.
Mealtime for the scavengers of the ancient Karoo plains. Here three different species of Pristerognathid (“needle-mouthed”) mammal-like reptiles are reconstructed scavenging the carcass of an adult Moschops, one of the herbivorous dinocephalians.
In reality, it is unlikely that these three different species would have all scavenged at the same time, as the most aggressive would have fended off the other, to make sure that it had enough to eat. It is possible however, that members of the same species would feed together much like hyenas do today.
Dr Lieuwe Boonstra devoted his working life to the reptile fossils of the Great Karoo region of South Africa.
During the 45 years that he worked at the South African Museum (1927 – 1972), he found over 1200 specimens and published at least 50 scientific papers describing numerous new species of mammal-like reptiles. His passion for fossils went beyond simply writing about them – he wanted everyone to see what they really looked like.
It took Dr Boonstra and his colleagues over a decade to compose these elaborate scenes. They are based mainly on his own research findings and are a good indication of the general state of knowledge at the time.
Today, over 50 years later with the discovering of many more fossils, palaeontologists at the Iziko SA Museum are able to give a much more detailed picture of the life and times of the ancient Karoo. The latest information on the landscape, climate, vegetation and especially the behaviour of these long-extinct animals has now been incorporated into the exhibition called “Stone Bones” on the top floor above the Whale Well.
Riverside scene. The Mid-Permian Period around 260 million years ago was a time when all the southern continents were welded together in a single land mass known as Gondwana.
Mountains along the southern margin of the supercontinent formed the source of many large rivers that flowed northwards across a vast flat riverine plain. The climate was humid and vegetation flourished especially along the banks of the winding rivers. Glassopteris trees and bushes with large flat leaves dominated the riverbanks whereas horsetails and ferns grew on the floodplains.
In the foreground a fleet-footed Hopposaurus has spotted a well camouflaged Diictodon which was too slow to react when the rest of the colony went to ground.
The Diictodon has decided to crouch down to blend in with the background and hope that it won’t be noticed.
260 million years ago (at least 60 million years before the dinosaurs), the South African Karoo regions were inhabited by a diverse array of land animals which were dominated by a long extinct groups of reptiles known as therapsids or “mammal-like reptiles”.
The two large therapsids on display are dinocephalians (meaning terrible head). They both have very thick bone on top of their skulls that was possibly an adaptation for head-butting.
On the left is Jonkeria and on the right Moschops. Both have long chisel shaped teeth used for grinding and slicing vegetation rather than meat.
Bradysaurus (“robust reptile”) was a big, fat and slow-moving reptile.
It had an armour-plated skin, presumably as protection from predators. Its rows of small blunt teeth are thought to have been used to graze on aquatic vegetation around ponds and lakes. The bony lumps in its skin, called osteoderms, are nearly always found scattered around the fossil skeletons.
Animals are rarely fossilized with their skin intact, but there is an example on display in the “Stone Bones” exhibition which now allows us to make much more accurate reconstructions of what this animal looked like.
There is a one in a million chance that a skeleton becomes a fossil, and an even smaller chance, perhaps, one in a billion, that it gets discovered before it is eroded away. Those are the odds against finding a fossil like this fully articulated Bradysaurus skeleton, which was discovered by Dr Boonstra on a farm near Fraserburg in the Karoo.
He spotted the shoulder blades sticking out of the rock and used his geological pick to carefully uncover the rest of the skeleton and brought it back to the South African Museum encased in plaster of Paris.
Notice the peculiar grooves on the head shield – an indication that the skin was firmly attached to the roof skull. This was perhaps to help regulate body temperature, suggesting that this was still a cold-blooded reptile.
Scymnosaurus (shark-like reptile) was the largest of the therocephalian carnivores living in the Karoo during the Mid-Permian period. In this diorama it has just begun to scavenge a freshly killed Bradysaurus.
The neck is a common target for predators to quickly kill prey. However, despite its size, Scymnosaurus was still unlikely to have been able to bring down a healthy, full grown Bradysaurus. Its teeth were quite fragile – built for slicing and tearing rather than stabbing. If the prey was weak from being stuck in mud for days on end, it is possible that the scavenger could have started to feed before it had died.
A reconstruction of the skeleton of the extinct reptile Bradysaurus seeleyi as it may have appeared shortly before fossilization within layers of hardened mud and clay.
For skeletons to become fossils they have to be buried. Luckily, none of the scavengers living at the time had teeth that were strong enough to crunch Bradysaurus bones so the skeleton that they left behind on the lake shore is fairly undamaged.
During the wet season the lake expanded to cover the skeleton and silt and clay particles settled to form layers over the bones. It would take 5 years or so for a carcass of this size to be completely buried. During this time it can get trampled and weathered. However, provided it remains buried, it has a chance of becoming a fossil.
Step 1: Finding, excavating and preparing
This is done by palaeontologists and specially-trained fossil finders who spend hours walking the slopes of the Karoo “koppies” looking for bones protruding from the rock. After carefully chiselling away the rock to expose the bones, they are coated with Plaster of Paris which hardens to form a rigid jacket in which the fossil stays until it reaches the laboratory. Here the fossil is prepared by a fossil preparator, who will use a dentist’s drill to remove as much of the surrounding rock as possible to finally expose all the bones.
Step 2: Casting the bones and mounting the skeleton
Once cleaned, the individual bones are cast in resin and mounted on a steel armature. The bones are placed in positions determined by looking at the shape of the joints and other articulation surfaces, as well as tendon scars that are still visible on the bone surface.
Step 3: Fleshing-out the skeleton
At this stage the skill of the model-maker brings the animal back to life.
Important soft tissue features such as skin folds, whiskers, eye colour and iris shape are all things that cannot be determined directly from the fossil, so they copy such details from modern reptiles like the iguana and monitor lizard.
Mealtime for the scavengers of the ancient Karoo plains. Here three different species of Pristerognathid (“needle-mouthed”) mammal-like reptiles are reconstructed scavenging the carcass of an adult Moschops, one of the herbivorous dinocephalians.
In reality, it is unlikely that these three different species would have all scavenged at the same time, as the most aggressive would have fended off the other, to make sure that it had enough to eat. It is possible however, that members of the same species would feed together much like hyenas do today.
260 million years ago (at least 60 million years before the dinosaurs), the South African Karoo regions were inhabited by a diverse array of land animals which were dominated by a long extinct groups of reptiles known as therapsids or “mammal-like reptiles”. The two large therapsids on display are dinocephalians (meaning terrible head). They both have very thick bone on top of their skulls that was possibly an adaptation for head-butting. On the left is Jonkeria and on the right Moschops. Both have long chisel shaped teeth used for grinding and slicing vegetation rather than meat
260 million years ago (at least 60 million years before the dinosaurs), the South African Karoo regions were inhabited by a diverse array of land animals which were dominated by a long extinct groups of reptiles known as therapsids or “mammal-like reptiles”. The two large therapsids on display are dinocephalians (meaning terrible head). They both have very thick bone on top of their skulls that was possibly an adaptation for head-butting. On the left is Jonkeria and on the right Moschops. Both have long chisel shaped teeth used for grinding and slicing vegetation rather than meat.