What made me think about them was a piece I read last week in Nature journal’s research highlights about the first-ever recorded fossilised tracks of baby sea turtles that were found right here on the southern Cape coast.
The little fossil “flipper prints” were made by baby turtles that had hatched 100 000 years ago, and were scurrying across the beach to reach the relative safety of the ocean.
It gives me goose flesh to think that we can still see the tracks these little creatures made 100 000 years ago.
Finding fossil bones is exciting, but there is something extra thrilling to see the actual footprints and tracks made by animals or humans hundreds of thousands of years ago, preserved in the rock for all time.
Anyway, the turtle fossil tracks got me talking to some people about an amazing collection of fossils found on the West Coast. They are around 4.
5 million years old, and were uncovered during phosphate mining decades ago.
I was lucky enough to work with these fossils when I was straight out of university. The bones and teeth were mostly broken and it was my job, with two other newly graduated workers, to reconstruct what we could, sticking tiny bits of bone together to form long bones, skulls, vertebrae and so on. We also had to put the bone fragments into broad categories, like bovids or carnivores, reptiles, birds and others.
When we started, there were of course many bone fragments we could not identify, and those we each put into little piles for our boss to identify.
We had been told how one of the paleaontologists had once played a trick on a gullible young technician who had worked at the museum before us. When she said she was unable to identify some teeth, the paleaontologist looked at them and announced: “Penguin teeth.”
She apparently muttered that she had never heard of birds having teeth, but dutifully put them in a box and labeled them “penguin teeth”, much to the mirth of the rest of the museum. The tale lived on.
Well, I was not going to be caught out like that, so when Brett, my boss, picked up a slender bone in my “unidentified” pile and said: “Penis bone,” I just looked at him and laughed. “You’re not going to catch me out like the penguin teeth story,” I replied.
“No, seriously, it is a penis bone,” he said.
I was not convinced. He was having me on. Eventually he hauled out a tome and opened it. Sure enough, there it was, a penis bone, or baculum. So some animals really did have them, including chimps, bears, seals, otters, dogs and many others.
“Do you believe me now?”
“Yes,” I nodded. “Sorry.”
I could say he replied: “No hard feelings,” but I would just be making that bit up.
