The roots of early mammals lie in the Karoo: Robert Broom's foundation and subsequent research progress

ABSTRACT

Robert Broom (1866–1951) was the first palaeontologist to live in South Africa. Having trained as a medical doctor in Scotland he came to South Africa in 1897 and practised medicine while pursuing palaeontology as a hobby. As a pioneering palaeontologist, with no bounds to his infectious enthusiasm, he made an enormous contribution to a wide variety of fields of palaeontological endeavour. The reason why he specifically came to South Africa was to explore the evolutionary origin of mammals by undertaking research on the therapsid fossil record from the rocks of the Karoo. It was in this field that he published most of his scientific papers. Despite the then lack of large comparative collections and good fossil preparation facilities, Broom not only laid the foundations of therapsid taxonomy, biology, diversity and biostratigraphy. He also contributed substantially to developing and promoting – both locally and internationally – expertise in the science of palaeontology in South Africa. This paper acknowledges the pioneering research foundation laid by Robert Broom in the Karoo, and highlights the subsequent increase in our knowledge of therapsids, their biology, and our understanding of the origins of mammals.

Keywords:

• Robert Broom
• Synapsida
• Therapsida
• Karoo

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the late John Skinner, then president of the Royal Society of South Africa, for his vision to hold a symposium at Rhodes University in Grahamstown to mark the 60th anniversary of the death of Robert Broom, and to Perry Kaye, Mike Davies-Coleman, Billy de Klerk and Rose Prevec, the organisers of the symposium, for inviting me to present this paper. Fernando Abdala, Chris Gow, Cynthia Kemp and Francis Thackeray are thanked for very helpful discussion and editorial input. This work was supported by the University Research Committee (URC) of the University of the Witwatersrand, the National Research Foundation (NRF), and the Palaeontological Scientific Trust (PAST) and its Scatterlings of Africa programmes.