Reminiscences of a Fossil Collector
T
he South Mozambique-Zululand
coastal basin was created soon
after the break-up of Gondwana,
when the newly-formed coastal margin
collapsed following the release of the
pent-up energy and volcanism that created
the Lebombo Mountains. Subsidence was
initiated about 120 million years ago,
creating a long-lived sedimentary basin
which is renowned as one of the great
fossil deposits on earth. Its importance
was brought to the attention of the
palaeontological world by Dr E. C. N.
Van Hoepen, then director of the National
Museum, Bloemfontein. Van Hoepen’s
work on the Zululand fossils was much
maligned by his contemporaries; this was
a time when only staff of the British
Museum were believed capable of
producing ‘good’ science. Interestingly,
however, on a recent visit to the Natural
History Museum in London an eminent
palaeontologist said to me, “I think maybe
old Van Hoepen was right”!
KwaZulu-Natal has one of the greatest
fossil deposits on earth. As the only
professional palaeontologist in KwaZuluNatal for the last two decades, and one of
only two invertebrate palaeontologists in
South Africa, I have been privileged to
have these deposits almost entirely to
myself, with the exception of the odd
foray by my colleague in Cape Town,
Herbie Klinger. These deposits range in
age from Lower Cretaceous to Recent,
and span 115 million years of earth
history. Over the last 20 years I have
amassed a collection of several hundred
thousand fossils from all the important
fossil-bearing units on the coastal plain.
For much of this collecting I was aided by
Palmnut Post Vol. 9 No. 1 July 2006
students, colleagues and family. In the
early days of collecting, the
companionship of my very young family
was particularly rewarding. Those were
good times. When the children were
young, my field work represented the
family holiday. I would pack four small
children, ranging in age from five to ten
years, into the Land Rover, together with
camping and collecting paraphernalia, as
well as butterfly nets and fishing rods,
and head for a week’s camping at False
Bay, never forgetting to stop at Mrs. B’s,
near Mtunzini, to buy pies for breakfast.
During the day we collected fossils.
However the greatest delight was the ride;
they used to love sitting on the roof of the
Land Rover, clinging to the roof rack
while I drove along bumpy roads through
the bush to reach a fossil locality.
Unfortunately some over-diligent park
warden brought that fun-part of the
collecting to an end. Once parked, they
would follow me through the bush like
the Pied Piper of Hamelin, never with the
slightest thought of danger. Well I
remember them following me through the
thick bush of Mkuze Game Reserve, often
with grass above their heads. While my
heart pounded with trepidation as to what
I would do if there were a rhino or Black
Mamba around the next corner, they
followed trustingly behind, always
interested in every little creature we came
across - digging ‘curlie-wurlies’ (antlion
larvae) from the sand was particular fun.
Mostly they couldn’t wait to collect
fossils. My daughter Fern was the first to
discover fossil crabs littering the beaches
north of Richards Bay, and my youngest
son Michael became a fossil collector par
excellence and, in later years when his
other siblings had outgrown ‘the bush’,
the most able of field assistants. Many of
the new species described by me over the
years owe their discovery to his keen
eyesight and enthusiasm.
For me, the enjoyment of geology and
fossil collecting is in getting out into the
bush, away from humans, and to enjoy the
natural world, the birds, the
animals, the reptiles,
insects and plants.
Moreover, fossil
collecting is
like having
Christmas
every day.
You never
know what
the next
clout of a
hammer
will bring,
or what is
going to be
discovered at the next outcrop. There is a
perpetual sense of anticipation and
excitement that few have had the pleasure
of experiencing. It was never work.
Spending so much time in the bush
allowed me to indulge my other passions.
In the beginning it was arming the
children with butterfly nets and
acquainting them with the local
butterflies. I will never forget my son’s
disappointment when he had the
opportunity of catching his first Saffron,
Iolaphilus pallene, a small creamy-yellow
lycaenid. Unfortunately it was sitting in
the middle of its larval foodplant, Blue
Sourplum, Ximenia americana, and as he
swiped the net tangled in the thorns of the
shrub and the butterfly flew away. He was
equally disappointed when his Dad
interfered with his attempts to catch his
first Hutchinson’s Highflier, Aphnaeus
hutchinsoni, sitting on a muddy patch, its
silver-spotted underside gleaming in the
sunlight, and this too escaped. However,
to Clive Quickelberge’s delight, he
discovered the first breeding colony of the
Azure Hairstreak, Hypolycaena caeculus,
in KwaZulu-Natal, as well as capturing a
Speckled Sulphur Tip, Colotis agoye, in
the Drakensberg. It was while my son was
charging around the bush collecting
butterflies, something that I had done with
my brother so many years ago, that I
began to ponder what else I could do.
Butterflies were so well known, almost
boring. Then it came to me – the Emperor
moths that had been popularized by my
eminent colleague at the Bulawayo
Museum, Elliot Pinhey. Pinhey, one of the
world’s most respected entomologists, had
resigned from the Bulawayo Museum on
being told that the George Arnold
collection of type Hymenoptera was to be
given to the Cape Town Museum in
exchange for the politically-sensitive
Zimbabwe Birds. This collection
numbered hundreds of types and was the
most important of the Museum’s holdings.
The ensuing fracas between me and
management saw me, and subsequently
several of my supportive colleagues,
fired from the National Museum;
where politics and science clash
there is only one winner.
No one had written a
book on the Emperor
moths of KwaZuluNatal and so my son
and I set about
collecting and
breeding the local
species. This meant
our days were
spent fossil
collecting,
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although he
turned more
stones over
in anticipation
of frogs and snakes
than fossils. In the
evenings he would
fish, and at night we
would collect moths.
Initially this meant visiting
the lighted public toilets
several times during the
night to see what had
arrived. The reason we
selected Emperor moths
was because they have no
proboscis and hence did
not feed. The sole
purpose of their existence
is to breed and reproduce
the species. Moreover,
once a female lays her eggs
she dies. Thus we didn’t
have to kill them. Females
that came to lights could be put
in shoe boxes where, if we were lucky,
they would lay some eggs which we
could then rear to maturity and document
their life histories. The problem with this
was that we had to have their larval foodplants readily available. This necessitated
another major hobby - learning about the
indigenous flora and growing indigenous
plants from seed. Thus, from then on, we
not only collected fossils, butterflies,
moths, snakes and frogs, we also picked
the fruits and berries from every bush and
tree we passed; our pockets hung low.
The seeds would be planted when we got
home and, soon, I had a veritable nursery
which was very time consuming. Now, as
we walked through the bush, we could
recognize lepidopteran food-plants and
search for eggs and caterpillars. After
seven years of collecting, breeding and
documentation, our work on
the KZN emperor moths
reached publication
stage. It was
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then I decided to
take early retirement
from the University,
create my own publishing
house, and publish the book myself.
And so Peroniceras Press was born;
Peroniceras is a common Cretaceous
ammonite in Zululand, particularly along
the Mzinene River. To create the book it
was necessary for me to become artist,
layout designer, editor, proof-reader and
desktop publisher. Eventually in 2002, our
book on The emperor moths of KwaZuluNatal was published. Unfortunately most
of the people who helped along the way
expected free copies and, horrifyingly, the
response of all too many conservationists
was to look at the book and say, “I’m not
interested in moths”. The stated intention
of the book was to provide the
information necessary for people to
become interested! As such it was a
financial catastrophe, but an achievement
of which we are both proud.
Lepidoptera were, however, not our only
interest. Our herpetological experiences
were great fun. Whenever there was light
rain we would drive the roads at night,
looking for frogs and snakes. We hardly
ever found snakes, although frogs were
aplenty. The road towards Monzi was
particularly fruitful as, at one point, there
are vleis on both sides with constant frog
traffic between the two. Especially
common were Brown-backed Tree Frogs,
Leptopelis mossambicus, which have the
endearing habit of covering their eyes
with their front feet when threatened. We
spent many hours rescuing these
delightful creatures from the traffic that
raced at break-neck speed along this
straight open piece of road. One can only
wonder at how many countless thousands
of frogs, many rare species, are destroyed
each year in this way. Another exciting
discovering was to find a recent
emergence of small African Bullfrogs,
Pyxicephalus edulis, hopping around
everywhere on the road to Charter’s
Creek, as was our first capture of the
black and red Banded Rubber Frog,
Phrynomantis bifasciatus. I was also
delighted to catch and photograph what
I believed to be a Leopard Toad, Bufo
pardalis, at False Bay, far from
previous known records; however, despite
its big dark leopard-like blotches, I could
not convince Angelo Lambiris who
decided it was a hybrid of unknown
parentage. I toyed with going back
and collecting the specimen, but
decided against it as it would
probably end up in a bottle of
alcohol. As it was, this was the last
time I saw this toad anyway, since it
lived not far from the hole of a large
Forest Cobra. Despite my love of animals
it was the dislike of killing them that
drove me away from zoology. With
palaeontology, I could enjoy and
contemplate the wondrous diversity of the
natural world without having to kill
anything, a real sop. However, I did once
have to convince the University ethics
committee that my fossils had been dead
countless millions of years, and did not
feel any pain when I bashed them with a
hammer!
For me our snake escapades were happily
few, although disappointingly so for my
herpetologically-mad son. I spent most of
my field years walking the bush in flipflops, believing the noise I made would
scare away mambas and cobras, and that
puff adders didn’t live in the dense grass
and thick bush I was treading. That was
until one day, near Mkuze, my son and I
had to rescue a large puff adder from
heavy traffic flashing along the freeway;
it had just emerged from dense long grass
on the roadside! Obviously the noise I
made did scare away most of the mambas,
as only twice did I have frightening
experiences. The first was at Mtubatuba
where a small borrow-pit yielded
beautiful opalized wood. I was leading a
student excursion, with 20-30 noisy,
mostly disinterested students following
me along a footpath through thick bush,
on the way to the deposit. Hearing a noise
in the bushes, I turned to the student
behind me and said, “Gee that was a BIG
snake”. Peering into the bushes alongside
the path, there was a large Black Mamba
staring straight at me, less than 2 m away.
I had the choice of shouting “Snake” and
creating absolute pandemonium, or
keeping quiet and hoping that no-one
would decide to relieve themselves in the
bushes at that point. I chose the latter and
fortunately the students survived to write
their exams, oblivious of how close they
had come to the deadliest of African
snakes. The second time was with my son
in the Palmiet Nature Reserve. We had
just seen a rather large olive snake slither
into a crevice among rocks; I had
contemplated being the ‘big deal’ and
grabbing it by its tail but the valour was
low and the discretion high – just as well.
When we returned a little later we found
it, a Mozambique Spitting Cobra, sunning
itself on a rock at the entrance to the
crevice. Having left the cobra, we walked
down a footpath. We hadn’t gone a
hundred yards when my son bent down to
pick up a stone, and a snake hissed at
him. As he tried to grab the snake, which
looked like a Striped Skaapsteker, I gazed
to my right and there, just a few metres
away, was a juvenile Black Mamba,
reared up and with gaping black mouth.
Palmnut Post Vol. 9 No. 1 July 2006
By now I was a gibbering wreck and
dragged my protesting son home.
Interestingly he returned a few days later
to catch the hissing snake and it turned
out to be a peculiar variety of Night Adder
in which the pale markings had almost
coalesced to form stripes. Perhaps one of
the disappointments was never seeing a
Gaboon Adder, although we did find our
first Marbled Tree Snake, Dipsadaboa
aulica, in the camp site at Monzi. Other
than that, I once encountered a cobra
returning from an evening drink at False
Bay; it spread its hood and, after a brief
share of pleasantries, we went our
separate ways.
Fortunately crocodile experiences were
also few. In retrospect the most
frightening was on one of my first student
excursions to Zululand. We had been
collecting fossils along the cliffs of the
Nibela Peninsula. It was scorchingly hot
and we were all sweaty and exhausted.
Looking across the still waters at Hell’s
Gate I saw a herd of hippo, a few hundred
metres offshore, silently watching us.
Somewhere along the way I had gained
the ridiculous idea that because hippos
and crocs do not get on, if there were
hippos nearby there wouldn’t be any
crocs. So I let 20-30 noisy, rowdy students
plunge into the murky muddy waters of
Lake St Lucia to splash and frolick for
five minutes. Needless to say, when the
park ranger found out what I had done, he
was aghast and showed me the skull of a
HUGE crocodile that had been poached,
by baited hook, just a few hundred metres
away a fortnight before! The other time
was along the lower reaches of the
Mfolozi, at Warner Drain. I was with my
former teacher and good friend, John
McCarthy, collecting fossils from the
Monzi Formation which was exposed in
an undercut bank of the river. I could see
a large marine snail which I knew had not
been collected from this formation before.
In order to get it, John had to hang onto
my legs while I dangled upside down over
the bank, trying to hack the fossil from
the rock. However, my nerve did not hold,
as on the muddy bank opposite there were
crocodile footprints and tail furrows;
some fossils are just not worth it.
Once supper had been finished, one of the
delights for my children was to sit on the
roof of the Land Rover while we took a
slow night drive through the dry sand
forest. The greatest fun was when one of
their siblings got hit by a branch,
especially when the youngest decided to
grab the branch of a thorn tree, but there
were usually nyala by the roadside, or
genets and galagoes in the trees.
Escapades with large predators were few.
Palmnut Post Vol. 9 No. 1 July 2006
One evening we surprised a
beautiful young leopard only a
few hundred metres from our
camp site at Lister’s Point;
appropriately it had just left
the Ingwe Trail! Another night was
more frightening. Being inherently
unsociable, my son and I decided to pitch
our very small flimsy tent in the middle of
the forest at Sodwana Bay, away from the
rowdy mass of visiting Vaalies. In the
middle of the night, well after midnight,
all hell broke loose. The monkeys in the
trees above us started screaming, and
there was loud screeching and
pandemonium among the banded
mongooses which had been foraging in
the leaf litter around our tent for some
time. My son and I sat bolt upright, eyes
as big as cart wheels, my head against the
roof of the very small tent and shoulders
against the sides. The next thing, with a
terrified screech, a mongoose ran straight
into the flimsy nylon of our tent. I was
rigid with fright and too terrified to stick
my head out of the tent to find out what
was going on. To this day, I believe a
leopard had been prowling round our tent.
The only other experience was being
scared witless by a rather tame hippo that
used to frequent the shores of Lister’s
Point. Late one moonless night, on our
way to check the toilet lights for moths,
we had to pass particularly close to a
clump of reeds where obviously the hippo
was browsing. It didn’t hear us, and we
didn’t see it. That is until we were almost
on top of each another, when it leapt with
a monumental splash into the lake, and
we sky-rocketed the other way. A lessharrowing experience, but almost as heart
stopping, occurred when I was walking
along a deep narrow erosion gulley,
barely wide enough for me, and was
suddenly cornered a large Water Monitor;
if I remember correctly, the lizard had 100
legs, all scrabbling in different directions
as it frantically scrambled to escape up
the steep embankment. Of particular
interest for me, was my wife and I coming
across ‘red’ squirrels in the forest at St
Lucia estuary. As a youngster I had kept
and bred both forest-dwelling Red
Squirrels and savanna Yellow-footed
Squirrels for a number of years; but
these ‘red’ forest squirrels were
yellow! As Peter Taylor patiently pointed
out to me, a different subspecies was
involved.
Although birds have been one of the main
passions of my life, there were
surprisingly few noteworthy encounters,
although a glimpse of a Pink-throated
Twinspot in the undergrowth near Kosi
Bay was memorable, as were
Reichenow’s Loerie in the forest at St
Lucia. The
evocative call of the
Fish Eagles around
Lake St Lucia lingers
with all who love the
African bush although, sadly,
only once in 20 years did I
see a Bateleur gliding
majestically along the Lower
Mkuze. I suspected that a
large brown raptor with
peculiar laboured flight,
spotted on the Mozambique
coastal plain, might have been
a Banded Snake Eagle; it would
have been a first for me but I
could not confirm it.
At one period my son and I developed
ichthyological interests, and spent much
time of one excursion dragging a
mosquito net through every shallow
stream and pond we encountered.
Interestingly, in the Mfolozi River we
caught the endangered Checked Goby,
Redigobius dewaali. We also caught
bilharzia. Fortunately our only other
serious encounter with protozoans was in
the Gona-re-Zhou on a moth-collecting
trip. About a week after returning from
Zimbabwe, I developed a splitting
headache. I had left my son butterfly
collecting and when I found him collapsed
under a bush with an equally severe
headache I knew we had malaria. It
seems, because we received prompt
treatment, we suffered no lasting effects,
although I well remember my son saying
he was going to burst into flames, his
temperature was so high. Such are the
joys of fossil collecting in Africa.
Prof. Michael Cooper
Trustee and Research Associate
Durban Natural Science Museum
All illustrations & photographs by Prof. Michael Cooper
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