The entrance to the West Coast Fossil Park gives nothing away about the sterling exhibition that lies beyond. (Photo: Clifford Roberts)
You are about to step back in time 5,2 million years, declares a sign in my path. I’m a little surprised, but this is no Stargate, supercharged Tardis from Dr Who or intergalactic hitchhiker’s black hole. It’s the entrance to the West Coast Fossil Park – a contemporary museum and paleontological dig site near Langebaan. It might be somewhat unexpected in these parts. To out-of-towners, the Cape West Coast is primarily a holiday destination for its great fishing, kitesurfing and just kicking back.
The fossil park and the window to ancient history it offers is new – well, new in the context of planetary time. The larger park area has been an official site for preservation for just 10 years. That was when its original proclamation as a national heritage site was expanded from 14 hectares to 700 hectares. But the time scale is a neat example of how recent our human history actually is, how much we’ve come to know since Homo sapiens arrived some 200 000 years ago, and how much we have yet to learn.
The museum comprises the visitor complex and the covered dig site. (Photo: Clifford Roberts)
This was fresh in my mind as I stepped past the welcome sign and took the descending path to the sub-surface ticket office. I’d just visited !Khwa ttu, a heritage centre owned by a non-profit company some 30 minutes down the road. This is an exhibition of not only one of the world’s last hunter-gatherer societies, but also what it calls “the archaeological story of the modern mind” on the southern African coastline. Plus, South Africa is home to a vast collection of museums, among the more famous in the field of what has been called “evotourism” being the Maropeng Cradle of Humankind.
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Humans have been around for a much shorter time than most of the deposits found at the Fossil Park. It made me think of shifting lenses in a camera: our eye is trained where the lenses take us.
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Humans have been around for a much shorter time than most of the deposits found at the Fossil Park. It made me think of shifting lenses in a camera: our eye is trained where the lenses take us. The full image is, however, still contained and available for us to see. Standing at a viewpoint overlooking the overgrown remains of a phosphate mine and domes covering the dig sites, I was focusing my lens into deep time – a time after the first organisms appeared on the planet, but before our own arrival.
Cataloguing fossil findings continues at the museum to this day. (Photo: Clifford Roberts)
Back then, 5,2 million years ago, sabre-toothed cats, short-necked giraffes, hunting hyenas, three-toed horses and African bears roamed these parts. And the landscape wasn’t scrubby, like now. The climate was humid and wet – subtropical, like KwaZulu-Natal. The countryside was lush and green, with forests and open grasslands. A water course, now the Berg River, once flowed through here to the sea. And although its course shifted northwards over aeons, it left its trace. Former mud flats, marshes and floodplains contain the remains of plants and animals – from the era between the Miocene and Pliocene – buried here over time.
The main hall provides an idea of what an earlier time on the West Coast looked like. (Photo: Clifford Roberts)
Miners discovered them many centuries later, finding fossils during their excavation of phosphate for fertiliser production in the 1940s. It became a magnet for scientists the world over. Mining ended in 1993, and the site was declared a national monument three years later. A public-private partnership under South Africa’s Iziko Museums launched the West Coast Fossil Park on 22 September 1998. My first visit to the place predated the current complex, now a large, open-spaced, concrete construction that opened in 2018. To my mind, it has ramped up the visitor experience.
The ocean once extended further inland than where it lies 10 kilometres away from the museum. This is the reason the collection includes the fossilised remains of marine animals, such as molluscs and whale bones. (Photo: Clifford Roberts)
“The key design element was the site and the way in which the buildings would be placed,” says Noero Architects, the company behind the project. “The marks left … by the previous mining operations were the starting point. The original site was damaged by mining operations – at the same time, the use of modern mining technology was responsible for the uncovering of the fossil bed and its treasures.”
The buildings are embedded into the slope of mounds of clean, mined material and layered to emphasise the historical site activities of both mining and palaeontology. In addition to the central museum exhibition space, with guided and self-guided tours, the park incorporates a gift shop, a restaurant, a play area for children and a full educational programme. A short golf cart drive to the 80 m² covered dig site is a highlight.
Executive manager, and a co-founder Pippa Haarhoff
Academic work at the dig has slowed in recent years, but its visitors continue to include classes of undergraduate students. One such group had in fact preceded my visit, said executive manager, and a co-founderPippa Haarhoff. “We use these opportunities to explore new ideas and ways to grow our visitor numbers,” she said. She added that it’s a fine balance between creating an appropriate setting and what she calls “Disney-fication”. Plans include eventually connecting the dig site to the main museum complex with covered walkways.
For now, I explore the museum’s display-laden passageways, anterooms and halls. Within them are oversized sculptures and posters depicting scenes of the epoch. A windowless showroom beneath has been designed as a subterranean cavern, complete with giant insects peering down from the ceiling. In contrast, a laboratory attached to the main hall continues to make valuable contributions to our understanding of the world. It still processes an archive of findings, with scientists aided by a team of eagle-eyed volunteers. During my visit, three people armed with tweezers and head-mounted loupes hunched over boxes of tiny fragments.
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“Those are bones from golden moles,” says Pippa, as I lean in for a closer look. “They’re five million years old.” I let that sink in.
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“Those are bones from golden moles,” says Pippa, as I lean in for a closer look. “They’re five million years old.” I let that sink in. The park can use all the hands it can get, she says. Individuals keen to volunteer and help in the laboratory should visit the park website’s dedicated volunteering page.
I’d forgotten the sign at the entrance, but when I passed it again on my way back to the car park, I was somehow disappointed. After all, I was headed back to the now. Travelling 5,2 million years into the past had been as exhilarating as I’d imagined, but not nearly as taxing.
