When palaeontologist Dr Rob Gess stumbled upon an animal skull dating back 260-million years while playing as a boy on his cousin's farm, his life's trajectory as a fossil researcher became cast in stone.
The then eight-year-old had found the fossil of a large Dicynodont skull, a herbivorous animal with a pair of tusks.
But the biggest discovery of his life happened almost 10 years later, when he was at high school in the 1980s, while pursuing his hobby — scouring for fossils on Waterloo Farm.
This led to the unearthing of a world-renowned fossil site at the farm near Rhodes in the Eastern Cape, and has seen Gess over the years meticulously piece together a 360-million-year-old bony fish with 5cm fangs.
Today he is a palaeontologist based at the Albany Museum and Rhodes University. Gess and Swedish palaeontologist Per Ahlberg, who worked together on reconstructing the fish, have described the new species in the latest issue of PLOS ONE journal.
The fish — scientific name, Hyneria udlezinye — preyed on tetrapods, four-legged animals, at the farm's prehistoric estuary.
Ahlberg — an international lobe-finned fish expert — came to South Africa to work with Gess on the collection, housed at the Albany Museum in Makhanda.
The pair completed their work in Ahlberg’s lab in Uppsala, Sweden.
Gess told the Sunday Times that when he first stumbled on prehistoric fish scales in the 1980s “it was all very exciting”.
“At the time I was aware that there were no known fish fossil remains of this age from South Africa and only very fragmentary plant remains.
• At least 2,7m - the length of the Hyneria udlezinye prehistoric fish
• 5cm long - the double fangs of the fish
— IN NUMBERS:
“I found all sorts of fossils at the time but the big scales were definitely quite special. I was fascinated to know exactly what kind of lobe- finned fish they came from. But the answer to that would be a long time coming.”
Gess said what started out as collecting interesting fossils at Waterloo farm has morphed into the biggest project of his professional career.
“By now we have storerooms containing thousands of fossils from Waterloo Farm, and we’re adding more every month.
“These represent more than 60 species of animals and plants, all but two of which are new to science.
“Hyneria udlezinye is now the 26th species that we have formally scientifically described and named from Waterloo Farm.”
Gess said the fossils uncovered at the farm have allowed him and his team to piece together an entire Late Devonian ecosystem — dating back about 360-million years. Devonian is a period around 400-million years ago known as the Age of Fishes.
“This is the world’s best ecologically understood Devonian tetrapod bearing ecosystem.”
Gess says he was a child when his destiny was set.
“At the age of eight, I was visiting my cousin's farm Vanwyksfontein, near Colesberg, and I found a bit of fossil bone protruding from the shale.
“I spent the afternoon scratching it out and more and more appeared until eventually I had found a large Dicynodont skull from 260-million years ago.”
He returned to Makhanda with the fossil and showed it to a retired professor who introduced him to a Rhodes university palaeontologist, Norton Hiller.
“From the day I found that fossil skull my life trajectory was pretty much set.”
Gess said while he is gradually describing the entire ecosystem from the Waterloo Farm fossils “reconstructing Hyneria udlezinye certainly became an exciting challenge”.
“Some of the bones are really huge, so it’s a really special part of the fauna.”
Ahlberg said the primary implications of the Hyneria udlezinye find are biogeographical.
“Towards the end of the Devonian period the two mega continents, Gondwana — which later broke up into Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica and India; and Euramerica, which broke up into North America, Greenland, Europe and parts of Asia — began to collide.
“This led to a great exchange of animals and plants between the two. As this was also the time that four-legged animals were beginning their journey onto land, we are very interested to understand the effects of this great exchange on ecosystems at the time,” he said.
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