In 1945 Broom, who was working at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria at the time, gave a public lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand. During his lecture, Broom informed all in attendance of the plight of South African fossils. Thousands of fossils were being lost every year in South Africa because there were no museums or places of research adequately equipped to store, categorize, and protect fossils that were recovered from the field. Broom stated that an academic premises dedicated to the endeavor of paleontological research was sorely needed in order for the prolific number of fossils collected to be stored correctly, studied effectively and that fossil discoveries of South Africa could be made known to the rest of the world.
One of the attendees of Broom's lecture was Bernard Price. Broom's eloquence and passion for South Africa's fossil discoveries persuaded Price to approach Broom and the university. Price soon provided the start-up capital needed to establish a research institute at the university dedicated to the collection, curation and research of South African fossils. It was decided that the geophysics research lab be moved to the main geology building on the University of the Witwatersrand campus, and the Bernard Price Institute was subsequently renamed the Bernard Price Institute of Palaeontological Research. Once the BPI was formally set up, Broom recommended that the young James Kitching, on his return from military service at the end of World War II, be the fledgling institute's first Director. Kitching was signed in as the first member of staff on 26 October 1945.[3]
Within a week of his appointment as Director, Kitching took a train from Johannesburg back to Graaff-Reinet to embark on his first official field trip for the BPI. Kitching borrowed his widowed mother's Buick sedan which he used as his field vehicle for his field trips around Graaff-Reinet and Nieu-Bethesda. Within five months Kitching, with the aid of his younger brothers, had assembled a collection of more than 200 fossilspecimens as research material for the Bernard Price Institute, mostly skulls of therapsidspecies. Price was so thrilled with the success of the institute's first field trip that he doubled his funding propositions for the BPI. This allowed the institute to extend its field collecting activities to include Sterkfontein in the north and also the Makapansgat caves at what was then known as the Northern Transvaal (now Limpopo Province) of South Africa.
Over the following decades, the academic staff of the Bernard Price Institute led numerous research teams to Antarctica, the Americas, continental Europe, and Russia. From the 1990s, the hominin fossil-bearing sites were discovered to be far more widespread. Researchers discovered new sites such as Gladysvale, Kromdraai, Environs Sites, Malapa, Maropeng, and Rising Star Cave. With exception of the Rising Star Cave, these new sites along with Sterkfontein and Makapansgat are now part of the greater Cradle of Humankind world heritage site. In addition, archaeology work has been led at sites such as Blombos Cave and the Klipdrift Shelter in association with the institute. A separate homininfossil vault has also been set up to separately store hominin fossils recovered from the various hominid-bearing fossil sites around the country.
When Kitching retired in 1990, the Director's post of the Bernard Price Institute was awarded to Professor Bruce Rubidge, the grandson of Sidney H. Haughton. Rubidge held his directorship position until the end of 2016, however, he still works closely with the institute. It is well known in the paleontology community of South Africa that Haughton and the Kitchings sparked the same passion for paleontology in Rubidge as a young boy that they had possessed. A brother of Rubidge, who inherited the Wellwood farm, maintains the Karoo fossil collection housed at the farm.
The Evolutionary Studies Institute remains an active research and teaching institution whose small staff and their students remain dedicated to exploring the fossils of the Karoo Basin and the famous hominin fossil-bearing sites - true to the original dreams of Broom and Price.[4][5]
^Hales, A.L., 1960. Research at the Bernard Price Institute of Geophysical Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A, 258(1292), pp.1-26.
