Rob and his real-life fantasy

You won't find anyone who gets as excited about ancient fish as Dr Rob Gess does. He's South Africa's foremost researcher on creatures that lived in the Eastern Cape around 360 million years ago

- MIA LOUW

Long before fossils were found outside Grahamstown in the mid-1980s, Rob Gess was bitten by the palaeontology bug.

“I grew up in Makhanda – the new name for Grahamstown – but I often visited my uncle’s farm in the Colesberg district of the Karoo. I found a Dicynodon skull there when I was eight years old and I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Dicynodon was a herbivorous animal that was toothless except for two prominent tusks – the name means “two dog teeth”. They thrived in the Upper Permian period around 250 million years ago, but it was fossils from an earlier period – the Late Devonian period around 360 million years ago – that catapulted Rob’s career.

“I was still in high school when the fossil site at Waterloo Farm was discovered in 1985. A new highway bypass was being cut through the hills south of Grahamstown as part of the government’s response to anti-apartheid protests. Protesters would block the road through the town and the township. When the road was diverted, fossil-bearing black shale was exposed.”

Following Rob’s earlier Karoo discovery, Dr Norton Hiller, a palaeontology professor at Rhodes University, had fostered his love of fossils. Norton led the early research on Waterloo and encouraged Rob’s exploration of the site, supervising his collection of material. Years later, after Rob had completed a science degree at Rhodes, Norton hired him to systematically excavate the site.

Waterloo had been a brackish estuary all those millions of years ago, where a river mouth opened to the sea. The remains of animals and plants settled in the dark mud where they often didn’t decay due to a lack of oxygen necessary for bacteria.