James Kitching

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James William Kitching (born February 6, 1922 , † December 24, 2003 ) was a South African vertebrate paleontologist and is considered one of the most successful fossil collectors in South Africa.

Kitching 1947

Life

As a teenager, Kitching was collecting fossils in the Nieu-Bethesda area in eastern Cape Province , where his family ran a farm and his father built roads (collecting fossils). The Scottish doctor and paleontologist Robert Broom (1866-1951), who was a professor at Victoria College in Stellenbosch and curator at the South African Museum in Cape Town, encouraged the family, as well as other farmers, to collect fossils. James Kitching proved to be particularly keen - at the age of seven he discovered his own species, called kitchingi by Broom Youngopsis .

He collected in particular over decades in the Karoo area and was considered the authority for the Therapsids of the Permian and Triassic and the stratigraphy of this time in the Karoo (Beaufort group). Such fossils were found in the Karoo area as early as the 1830s by the Scottish engineer and amateur geologist Andrew Geddes Bain , and later Robert Broom collected them in the Karoo. When the Bernard Price Institute of Paleontological Research was founded at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg in 1945 , kitching was employed there. Despite the lack of formal training, he received his doctorate for his work in the Karoo at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1972 and became professor and director of the Bernard Price Institute. His collections are also located there. In 1990 he officially retired, but continued to work as an Honorary Research Fellow of the institute until his death .

Another focus of his work was the biostratigraphy of the Elliot Formation of the South African Triassic and the Clarens Formation of the Jura (see also Karoo Supergroup ). He also looked at Pleistocene vertebrate fossils during excavations in various caves. Among other things, he found Australopithecus fossils in the Cave of Hearths in Makapansgat in 1947 , then described by Raymond Dart as a separate species and now assigned to Australopithecus africanus . In this context, he also studied Pleistocene fossils in Europe.

As a participant in the US Antarctic expedition in 1970/71 in the Queen Maud Mountains , he discovered the first therapsid fossils ( Thrinaxodon ) in Antarctica from the same time as the Lystrosaurus finds in South Africa, which was a further indication of the former connection with Africa .

In 1977, on the occasion of road construction work in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park , he excavated a clutch of 190 million-year-old dinosaur eggs from Massospondylus , which after dissection showed well-preserved embryos.

In his hometown Nieu-Bethesda is a museum with his finds ( Kitching Fossil Exploration Center ).

Kitching with fossils of Lystrosaurus

He was married, took his family with him to collect fossils, and guided his children to do so from an early age.

Honors

Individual evidence

  1. ^ History of the discovery of the Karoo fossils in Paul Selden, John Nutts Evolution of fossile Ecosystems , Manso Publ., 2nd edition 2012
  2. ↑ Biography at South African Tourism
personal data
SURNAME Kitching, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kitching, James William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1922
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 2003