Nairobi National Museum underwent a long renovation recently, reopening in 2008 after three years. A more modern facade greets visitors and this dinosaur guards the 
entrance. The dinosaur resembles a T-rex but beyond that it is difficult to discern which dinosaur it is as there is no interpretive sign. Plus it looks like a cartoon character. What does that bode for the inside of the museum?
In the foyer themed halls radiate out. To our left is the East African Birds Hall and we start there. Displays cases fill the room and they are full of stuffed birds. Hundreds and hundreds of stuffed birds, from white pelicans to the tiny tit. Signage is minimal – an inch square piece of aging paper with a typewriter-written name and sometimes a short description – and even a few of those are hidden behind a bird or two. Sometimes the descriptive paper is there but without the bird. However what does come through loud and clear, no 
interpretation needed, is the sheer overwhelming number of birds that live in or visit East Africa. Hail this bird paradise. The piddly few I have seen and recorded are nearly embarrassing to contemplate. I feel like I’ve been birding this whole time with blinders on, missing far more than I see. The Bird Hall is both inspiring and humbling – and I hope it is next on the renovation list. There is so much more to birds than their names and a stuffed specimen.
The mammal hall is slightly less intimidating. The dioramas and displays feature both creatures we have seen and many we have not. The specimens appear to be the same ones as were used prio
r to the renovation, done in a 50’s style taxidermy. But I suppose that is better than going out and shooting new specimens, right? This most impressive elephant is a main display and was far too big for a good photo. Ahmed, as he was called, acquired national protection from the government when local people were afraid he’d be poached for his incredible tusks. These aren’t the biggest or heaviest tusks but they are nearly perfectly symmetrical. Ahmed died of natural causes and now is immortalized in the museum. A lucky pachyderm indeed.
Finally, the holy grail of the museum – The Hall of Human Origins. Kenya is home to arguably the most, and the most important, paleo-anthropological finds in history. The Nairobi museum has done a spectacular job of displaying and interpreting these finds. In order of evolutionary 
appearance we read of Aegyptopithecus, Proconsul and Kenyapithecus and their progeny which became the primates. Moving along (very slowly) there are then the missing years, millions of them. We know almost nothing about an eleven-million year time span between primates and hominid formation. The museum makes no apologies for what it does not know. Nor does it question evolution or ask you to consider creationism. Time and chance are the creators here.
That the fossils were discovered at all boggles the mind and panels explain what was found where by whom. Here are photos taken of the discovery of Turkana Boy, a nearly complete skeleton of Homo erectus, one of the most fantastic finds ever. The ground he was found in looks like most of the land 
around Turkana – what was it that drew the fossil hunter to that very spot? I imagine he must have lost his mind when he realized what he was looking at. Only the brow crown was visible in the rock matrix. Beneath the rocks and scattered about were fossilized bones of such importance you might conclude they were laid there on purpose to be found by us, millions of years later. What a rush.
At the end of the Origins Hall is a discrete sign saying Skull Room. It is a small room. Arranged around the walls are jewel-like display cases with carefully staged lighting. Long tapestry panels that describe each glass case. A narrow coffin-size display lays at the center. The atmosphere is hushed. For here, face to face, are the actual fossils of the ancestors of human beings. The real thing. From the rocky desert ground, painstakingly reassembled, are the skulls of Erectus, 
Rudolphenisis, Habilis, Robutus, and the others. It is breathtaking. I am moved to tears – I cannot believe it. Of course these skulls have been a part of science since their discovery but until now they have not been so beautifully and publicly displayed. Here is Proconsul, where it is thought the primate family tree began. Here is Paranthropus aethiopicus or Black Skull, so-called for the patina it acquired while it laid around waiting to be found. In the center display case is the wonder of Kenya, the amazingly complete Turkana Boy. Turkana Boy was likely between 12 and 18 when he died 1.5 million years ago. How could such delicate bones survive for that impossible amount of time? How did the whole of his lineage survive? Yet here we are, looking at him. We are his cousins, the survivors.
There are no postcards of the Skull Room for sale at the museum; too bad, I’d have bought them all. The Hall of Human Origins is worth a second trip, perhaps after we visit the most famous Ethiopian fossil, Lucy. It is a wonderful world we live in, and have lived in for so long. Hope we can keep it together for a few more million years.
OK, for the record, nearly all of the Mesosaurus remains found on Dr. Geit Steenkamp’s Spitskop farm are not fossilized bone but are the imprints of bodies laid down in the mud of a shallow sea that stretched from Africa to South American. Break open the right piece of grey slate rock and you may find a perfect impression of this primitive animal when it died and was covered in a layer of fine ash 250 million years ago.
Mesosaurus in the billions lived and died in the muddy sea and they have become the primary evidence that the continents were once joined and then split apart. Mesosaurus fossils and imprints have been found in Brazil and here on Spitskop farm, and they are exactly the same.
Believe it or not, it has only been since the late 1940s that science concluded it wasn’t just coincidence that the western coastline of Africa and the eastern coastline of South America were matched pieces of a puzzle. There is no coincidence in nature. Imagine Geit’s surprise when the strange rock his son found turned out to be more evidence of plate dynamics. He and his son lead entertaining tours on their property on yet another journey back in time on our trip through Africa.
Geit’s bush camp is rated highly and for good reason. It is neat, clean, has hot water and for a bonus, there’s a Sociable Weaver nest in the tree at our site. We follow him in the Beagle out onto the farm and stop at the grave of a German soldier killed in an attack by the indigenous Nama people in 1907 – another depressing story of colonial expansion in Africa. But I digress. The imprinted fossil remains Geit shows us are truly astonishing in their detail and we have a blast exclaiming over this one and that one. Paleontologists assume there are endless remains to be found here. Geit agrees with me that it is in the looking for them that lays the pleasure. At least when it isn’t blazing hot out.
Dolerite rocks are the other attraction on the tour. Lava that didn’t quite make it all the way to the surface cooled just below, and as time went on the ground above the cooled dolerite eroded and exposed the material. The gigantic stones were left carefully stacked on each other, a sculpture garden courtesy of time. We hang around after Geit plays a tune on the rocks – he is really a good tour guide – and try to capture the view of the rocks and Quiver Trees. With over 5,000 Quiver Trees on the property and who knows how many rocks (haha) I give up and instead focus on these crazy crickets – aren’t they cute?
On Adrian’s suggestion, we took off for the south coast. The trial run of the Beagle led us to where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet at Cape Agulhus along a coastline lined with shipwrecks from as far back as the early 1700s and as current as 1960. It’s not quite the coast of “Skeletons on the Zahara” (an excellent non-fiction account of the survivors of a Dutch ship in the 1800s) but it has its share of drama. On this day, the sea is opal green and only tourists are about. Well, tourists and vicious biting ants. Stopping to photograph the scene is to be swarmed and bitten by these tiny monsters. The tiny will rule the earth.
Penguins rule at Betty’s Bay. The colony of African Penguins is one of two on the southern coast, the other being at Boulder Beach.
These elegant birds are so endangered that any colony is fiercely protected and one must be careful not to disturb them. South Africa does a nice job of combining tourism and protection in this area; one can walk among the birds on boardwalks and the interpretative signs are current, if not a bit depressing.
Moving inland we traveled through the De Hoop Reserve with its enormous white sand dunes and on into the Karoo, a scenic land reminiscent of the desert Southwest in America. The resemblance is only superficial. The American desert is a baby compared to the age of this African land.
About the time the very smallest creatures were forming, the land around us – the coastline and the inland Karoo region – was being contorted and punished by the breakup of Pangea, the super-continent of early earth. This place, the Karoo, is really really ancient. Fossils here date from the Permian Era, 100 million years before the dinosaurs came into being – 100 million years! The creatures fossilized here are bizarre as any to ever form. Looking at them, encased in stone and viewed at the excellent Fossil Walk in the Karoo National Park, I consider how long it took for these creatures to get the way they were – like big flat turtles with no shell sliding around in the muddy primordial ooze on short stubby limbs. And on and on life goes; these creatures petered out and reptiles formed. What a trip thinking about the time frame as we drove through the hot and dry Karoo.
We tackled Swartsberg Summit, a high rocky pass, to see how the Beagle would handle the 4×4 terrain.
I drove up, and I give it a pucker factor of 30 on a range of 1-10. Going down pinged the pucker factor even more – people do this for fun, you know! It was a blast; the Beagle is a rock-crushing machine (and a thirsty one) and she could eat that pass for breakfast. Turning her around is a project – for the many times we need to make u-turns. There are four or five navigation devices on board and we still wind up turning around for missed turns or wrong ways. Narrow streets in the townships are the most difficult to negotiate but people are nice, pointing out the way through.
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