page_title: James Kitching
section_title: Footnotes
hierarchical_section_title: James Kitching / Footnotes
caption_attribution_description: Exhibit in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This exhibit is old enough so that it is in the public domain, and photography was permitted in the museum. I took this photograph and release it into the public domain.
context_page_description: James William Kitching was a South African vertebrate palaeontologist and regarded as one of the world’s greatest fossil finders.
context_section_description: A prominent rock ridge (85°12'S 177°06'W) on the west side of Shackleton Glacier, between Bennett Platform and Matador Mountain, in the Queen Maud Mountains in Antarctica is officially mapped 'Kitching Ridge' in his honour.
  Invited to join the Ohio State University Institute of Polar Studies 1970-71 geological party to the Queen Maud Mountains as part of the US Antarctic Research Programme, he, together with James (Jim) Collinson, was the first person to identify and collect therapsid (proto-mammal) fossils there, of Lystrosaurus Zone age, confirming the former continental link between southern Africa and Antarctica.
  In 1977 James Kitching recovered seven Massospondylus eggs that had been exposed by roadmaking operations in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park in South Africa. In January 2000, Professor Robert Reisz from the University of Toronto at Mississauga in Canada was on a research visit to South Africa and borrowed the fossil eggs to take back to Canada. Diane Scott of his laboratory carried out the difficult preparation under a high magnification microscope. Hans Sues, a Smithsonian palaeontologist who helped analyse the 190-million-year-old eggs — the oldest from a vertebrate animal ever discovered — confirmed that Kitching had been correct in his identification of the eggs. The embryos are so well preserved, that they have yielded remarkable insights into dinosaur biology and behaviour. They are the oldest evidence for caregiving among dinosaurs in that the animals' undeveloped teeth suggest that Massospondylus hatchlings needed help in feeding.
  He married Betty Kitching and had a family of one son and two daughters.
caption: Cast of eggs and an embryo, Royal Ontario Museum
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