James William Kitching (6 February 1922 – 24 December 2003) was a South African vertebrate palaeontologist and regarded as one of the world’s greatest fossil finders.

Career

His work in the southern hemisphere, including

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest contine ...

, led to the establishment of one of the world's finest fossil collections, housed at the

Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research The Evolutionary Studies Institute (ESI) is a paleontological, paleoanthropological and archeological research institute operated through the Faculty of Science of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Previously know ...

(BPI) in Johannesburg.University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Bernard Price Institute
He contributed greatly to the

Karoo The Karoo ( ; from the Afrikaans borrowing of the South Khoekhoe !Orakobab or Khoemana word ''ǃ’Aukarob'' "Hardveld") is a semi-desert natural region of South Africa. No exact definition of what constitutes the Karoo is available, so its ext ...

palaeontology of southern

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

, and

Gondwana Gondwana () was a large landmass, often referred to as a supercontinent, that formed during the late Neoproterozoic (about 550 million years ago) and began to break up during the Jurassic period (about 180 million years ago). The final stages ...

, and was an authority on the stratigraphic and distributional relationships of Permo-Triassic reptiles from South Africa. He published more than fifty papers and books on various facets of palaeontology. His contribution to Karoo palaeontology of southern Africa and Gondwana, earned him international recognition. Kitching also studied

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological Epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fina ...

mammals. In this regard he excavated and researched

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

s from several cave sites, the most notable being the Cave of Hearths and the limeworks at

Makapansgat Makapansgat () (or Makapan Valley World Heritage Site) is an archaeological location within the Makapansgat and Zwartkrans Valleys, northeast of Mokopane in Limpopo province, South Africa. It is an important palaeontological site, with the local ...

where he discovered the type specimen of what Professor Raymond Dart described as a new species of the "ape man" ''

Australopithecus ''Australopithecus'' (, ; ) is a genus of early hominins that existed in Africa during the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene. The genus ''Homo'' (which includes modern humans) emerged within ''Australopithecus'', as sister to e.g. ''Austral ...

'', ''A. prometheus'' in 1947. This is now considered a synonym of the type species, ''A. africanus'', which Dart described in 1925. Together with Professor Raymond Dart, he undertook pioneering taphonomic research on the bone accumulations at Makapansgat. These projects entailed spending time in the Netherlands, Belgium and France to study Palaeolithic mammalian faunas; he was also involved in the analysis of fossils from Pinhole Cave in England. Despite not having had a standard undergraduate academic background, he was permitted by the Senate of the

University of the Witwatersrand The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African Public university, public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( o ...

to register for a Master of Science degree. For his research on Karoo fossils, completed in 1972, he was awarded a doctorate. Having refined the biostratigraphy of the rocks of the

Beaufort Group The Beaufort Group is the third of the main subdivisions of the Karoo Supergroup in South Africa. It is composed of a lower Adelaide Subgroup and an upper Tarkastad Subgroup. It follows conformably after the Ecca Group and unconformably underlie ...

in South Africa, he started a major collecting project in the Triassic and Jurassic rocks of the Elliot and Clarens Formations in South Africa, and published the first biostratigraphic scheme for these lithological units as well.

Awards and honours

At the time of his retirement at the age of 68 in 1990, Professor James Kitching was Reader in Karoo Biostratigraphy and also Director of the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research. Subsequently, he was appointed Honorary Research Professorial Fellow at the Institute, a position he held until his death. He received numerous national and international awards including honorary doctorates from UPE and Wits, the Gold Award of the Zoological Society of South Africa, The Draper Award of the Geological Society of South Africa, honorary life membership of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in the United States and the Palaeontological Society of Southern Africa, and most recently the prestigious Morris Skinner Award of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Early life

His introduction to fossils and collecting started at the age of six, when he scoured the countryside around

Nieu-Bethesda Nieu-Bethesda (Afrikaans for ''New Bethesda'') is a village in the Eastern Cape at the foot of the Sneeuberge, approximately north of Graaff Reinet. It was founded in 1875 as a church town, like many other Karoo villages, and attained municipa ...

, where he grew up, to find specimens for

Robert Broom Robert Broom FRS FRSE (30 November 1866 6 April 1951) was a British- South African doctor and palaeontologist. He qualified as a medical practitioner in 1895 and received his DSc in 1905 from the University of Glasgow. From 1903 to 1910, he ...

. A year later he discovered the type specimen of ''Youngopsis kitchingi'' Broom. This fossil was the first of many new species which he would present to science in later years. When the University of the Witwatersrand set up the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research, he was appointed as the first member of staff on 26 October 1945 and mandated to collect fossils from the Karoo. His first collecting trip was to the Graaff-Reinet district where he had spent his youth with his brothers Ben and Scheepers.

Footnotes

A prominent rock ridge (85°12'S 177°06'W) on the west side of Shackleton Glacier, between Bennett Platform and Matador Mountain, in the

Queen Maud Mountains The Queen Maud Mountains are a major group of mountains, ranges and subordinate features of the Transantarctic Mountains, lying between the Beardmore and Reedy Glaciers and including the area from the head of the Ross Ice Shelf to the Antarcti ...

in Antarctica is officially mapped 'Kitching Ridge' in his honour. Invited to join the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

Institute of Polar Studies 1970-71 geological party to the

as part of the US Antarctic Research Programme, he, together with James (Jim) Collinson, was the first person to identify and collect

therapsid Therapsida is a major group of eupelycosaurian synapsids that includes mammals, their ancestors and relatives. Many of the traits today seen as unique to mammals had their origin within early therapsids, including limbs that were oriented more ...

(proto-mammal) fossils there, of

Lystrosaurus ''Lystrosaurus'' (; 'shovel lizard'; proper Greek is λίστρον ''lístron'' ‘tool for leveling or smoothing, shovel, spade, hoe’) is an extinct genus of herbivorous dicynodont therapsids from the late Permian and Early Triassic epochs ( ...

Zone age, confirming the former continental link between southern Africa and Antarctica. In 1977 James Kitching recovered seven ''

Massospondylus ''Massospondylus'' ( ; from Greek, (massōn, "longer") and (spondylos, "vertebra")) is a genus of sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Early Jurassic. (Hettangian to Pliensbachian ages, ca. 200–183 million years ago). It was described by S ...

egg An egg is an organic vessel grown by an animal to carry a possibly fertilized egg cell (a zygote) and to incubate from it an embryo within the egg until the embryo has become an animal fetus that can survive on its own, at which point the a ...

s that had been exposed by roadmaking operations in the

Golden Gate Highlands National Park Golden Gate Highlands National Park is located in Free State, South Africa, near the Lesotho border. It covers an area of . The park's most notable features are its golden, ochre, and orange-hued, deeply eroded sandstone cliffs and outcrops, es ...

in South Africa. In January 2000, Professor Robert Reisz from the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

at Mississauga in Canada was on a research visit to South Africa and borrowed the fossil eggs to take back to Canada. Diane Scott of his laboratory carried out the difficult preparation under a high magnification microscope. Hans Sues, a Smithsonian palaeontologist who helped analyse the 190-million-year-old eggs — the oldest from a vertebrate animal ever discovered — confirmed that Kitching had been correct in his identification of the eggs. The embryos are so well preserved, that they have yielded remarkable insights into dinosaur biology and behaviour. They are the oldest evidence for caregiving among dinosaurs in that the animals' undeveloped teeth suggest that Massospondylus hatchlings needed help in feeding. He married Betty Kitching and had a family of one son and two daughters.

References

Sources

*Tribute to James Kitching by Bruce Rubidge & Mike Raath (

) {{DEFAULTSORT:Kitching, James 1922 births 2003 deaths South African paleontologists