Shepherd stumbles across sleeping giants in a dinosaur graveyard

In the banks of a dry riverbed that courses among the foothills of the towering mountains of Lesotho, a team of dinosaur hunters are on their hands and knees chipping away at the ground.

As the Sun beats down on the exposed slope and dust fills the air, the researchers meticulously chisel away. The soft rock eventually gives way to the skull of a large meat-eating animal followed by a chain of vertebrae disappearing into the bank.

The last time these bones saw the light of day, early mammals were only just darting around the undergrowth, flowers were yet to evolve and dinosaurs had just begun their rise to dominance.

Now these remains are helping scientists to understand exactly what happened at the end of the Triassic Period some 200 million years ago, when the world experienced one of the biggest mass extinction events in its 4.5-billion-year history.  

It is also helping the rural community remain at the heart of this discovery and benefit from the fossils that lie beneath their soils.

'I was so intrigued to finally see what I had spent years looking for.'

On the edge of an extinction

Sginyane was certain that what Dumangwe had found was important, so he began phoning around the universities of South Africa to tell them about the fossils from the village. Eventually news of the discoveries got to Jonah, who studies both the early dinosaurs that would once have been roaming these hills and the extinction event recorded in these rocks.

'I study the Triassic-Jurassic boundary,' explains Jonah. 'There was a big extinction event that happened at this point about 200 million years ago, and the questions I'm trying to answer with this fieldwork are how the animals crossed that boundary and how they flourished again in the wake of that mass extinction.

'During the Triassic there were crocodiles, dinosaurs, and big mammal-like animals and it really wasn't clear which group was going to win and take over the Earth. But by the time we get to the Jurassic - just a few million years later - it's obvious that the dinosaurs have won.' 

What is so significant about this site is that it shows for the first time an ecosystem already teeming with dinosaurs that were living alongside these other animals. 

Ancient river systems

The site at Qhemegha is part of what is known as the lower Elliot Formation. This layer of rock dates to around 210 million years ago and encircles the mountainous Kingdom of Lesotho. This layer, which reaches up to 500 metres thick in some places, has outcrops and exposures across much of Lesotho and the surrounding South African states.

The landscape in this part of South Africa is arid for much of the year, dominated by low grasses and scrub as the rivers flow only seasonally. But back during the Triassic Period, the scene would have been dramatically different. 

Vast river systems once flowed year-round across this region. These wide, shallow rivers would have contained sediment which would give rise to the Elliot Formation millions of years later. They also supported huge numbers of wildlife. 

The rise of the dinosaurs

Plenty has already been found at Qhemegha. During the first expedition in 2018, Jonah and his colleagues discovered the remains of some fairly large animals.

These come from dinosaurs called sauropodomorphs, the early ancestor to the sauropods such as Dippy the Diplodocus. Measuring around five metres or more, these sauropodomorphs already had the long, slender necks characteristic of the much larger sauropods that would come later - but they were still walking on their hind legs.   

Hundreds of specimens of sauropodomorphs - particularly a dinosaur called Massospondylus - are known from southern Africa from rocks that are younger than those at Qhemegha. It has long been thought that these animals were what is known as a disaster taxon, a group of animals that weathered the mass extinction event at the end of the Triassic and then became incredibly common as they took advantage of the resulting empty landscape.

Now this theory is looking increasingly unlikely. 

More and more species of dinosaur that were similar in appearance to Massospondylus are being described from the end of the Triassic and the beginning of the Jurassic. This suggests that rather than a single species being the dominant herbivore, these ecosystems were far more complex.

There were perhaps up to a dozen species of sauropodomorphs ambling around the forests and prairies of the Late Triassic. This idea is supported by the finds at Qhemegha, which suggest that a whole range of different types of sauropodomorphs were present.

'We're also developing a curriculum for the high school to improve the maths and sciences and include teaching about the fossil sites,' explains Jonah. 'On top of that we're also adding to the geography curriculum to teach about the site in more depth.

'As part of the excavations, we carry out geological mapping. So by adding geography to the curriculum we can add in these mapping skills which are in high demand not just in palaeontology but in many scientific fields as South Africa is so rich in mineral resources.' 

By enthusing the younger folk in the village about the work, it is hoped that some may be encouraged to explore this route of study themselves. This may support students from Qhemegha studying the fossils found in the hills surrounding their own village.

The significance of the site is already a huge point of pride for the villagers.

'Long before our old great-grandfathers, they knew about these bones and they would tell stories about them,' explains Sginyane. 'But they didn't know what to do with them.

'Now Jonah has come and explained what they are to the community and it has sparked the quest to know more about them.'