How to keep your skeletons in the cupboard

Faced with the dilemma of a steady inflow of newly discovered fossils from South and Southern Africa and an already overcrowded  and inflexible storage space, Prof Bruce Rubidge, director of the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research (BPI) at Wits University in Johannesburg, turned to Universal Storage Systems which he was told had  installed a successful system some years ago at the SA Aquatic Biodiversity Institute in Grahamstown.

USS area manager in Gauteng Kobus Koen describes how he looked at finding a solution.

“They had to either move to an off-campus site or revamp the existing storage. I saw that they had static shelving, with an aisle between each line of shelves, which meant there was a huge waste of space. By installing mobile shelves, we could reduce the aisles to one per set of shelves, so it was decided to revamp the existing storage space.

What we have done is remove the static shelves, lay tracks  in the floor and  set unimobile bases on them. New shelving was placed on the  mobile bases, with each row of shelves having its own mobile base.  A manually operated drive wheel at one end of each row of shelves drives the bases by way of a chain and sprocket meshing with a rack on the floor. This means that at any one time, there is only one aisle, no matter how many rows of shelves there are, and the aisle can be between any of the rows of shelves as required.

It has meant a 60 per cent increase in storage space overall and by 72 per cent in the storage area for fossil vertebrates from the Karoo. We  provided a variety of shelving and drawers so that fossils ranging from small to large can be stored with the minimum of space wastage. We also mobilised their cupboard section in the same way.”

Prof Rubidge explained the importance of storing fossils: “Fossils belong to the State and as curators we are obliged to preserve them. They are irreplaceable and  invaluable.  They cannot be recreated.

The USS mobile storage installation has enabled us to not only store all the fossils we have and are likely to get for the next 20 years, but it has also made it possible to catalogue them all according to where they are stored. The catalogue is on a computer data base. Local or visiting scientists can easily find a specific fossil by looking it up in the data base which will guide them to the exact location of the fossil in the  shelving.

As far as I know this mobile system is the first installed for fossil storage in South Africa"

Besides fossilised bones, the BPI has the largest collection of fossil plants in the southern hemisphere, and the USS mobile system has also provided proper storage for them.

Prof Rubidge is clearly very happy that his (fossil) skeletons are now safely in the cupboard.