by Thinus Ferreira
Just like the iconic scene from the first Jurassic Park movie, where a real T-Rex ends up in the visitor's centre main rotunda in its massive glory as a banner glides down, Dr Steve Boyes stands in front of a display of an elephant at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., in Ghost Elephants.
But he isn't after a dinosaur.
The South African National Geographic Explorer and conservation biologist is trying to track down a creature far more elusive.
In Ghost Elephants, a new documentary film from acclaimed director Werner Herzog, Dr Steve Boyes - a real modern-day Indiana Jones - goes to the museum's rotunda, and later into its archives to extract a DNA sample, to examine "Henry", the largest elephant ever killed.
Directed, written and narrated by Werner Herzog, and produced by Ariel León Isacovitch and Herzog, Ghost Elephants is from Sobey Road Entertainment, The Roots Production Service and Skellig Rock.
Ghost Elephants is available on Disney+ and premieres on National Geographic Wild (DStv 182) on Wednesday, 11 March at 18:00 and in the forest of Angola, Dr Steve Boyes is determined to prove their existence.
With the film's release comes the coffee table book "Okavango and the Source of Life" by Dr Steve Boyes, which expands the journey beyond the documentary film, with more than 100 striking photographs, detailed maps, and Boyes’
personal reflections from years of gruelling expeditions to the Angolan
headwaters of the Okavango.
During the course of Ghost Elephants, Dr Steve Boyes and a crew travel into the mysterious Angola highlands searching for proof of the existence of a missing "tribe" of large elephants - part legend, part hope, part superstition and part of Africa's unsolved secrets: The ghost elephants of Lisima.
Teaming up with fellow National Geographic Explorer Kerllen Costa and three KhoiSan master trackers – Xui, Xui Dawid, and Kobus – they venture into a world where technology fails and that requires human eyes and human intuition to try and track down the potential living descendants of the largest land mammal ever recorded.
I had the opportunity to speak to Dr Steve Boyes about Ghost Elephants and got to ask him two questions.
"For National Geographic, this year is the 10th anniversary of the Okavango Wilderness Project," he says, giving a "bigger picture" overview of what he's been busy with.
"We have discovered and documented over 275 new species through science, new populations of endangered species up in these same highlands in Angola, working with the local Luchazi, the Chokwe and the Mbundu hunters and traditional leaders there," Dr Steve Boyes told me.
"So this is a long-term programme and we work across genetics, environmental DNA, detailed river surveys and storytelling to explain those findings to not just people in Angola and in Africa, but people globally, since science needs translation".
Seen done in Ghost Elephants, I also asked him to weigh in on modern humanity's ability to use things like supercomputers to do genetic analyses from a 70-year-old elephant skull and make genetic comparisons that help in these scientific quests and, although not out in the real world, aid scientists in finding proof of things we never would have been able to get before.
"We have the largest freshwater fish collection in the Southern hemisphere, so we can now employ new technology to help us. With one litre of water, we can tell you every single fish that's been in it during the last two weeks," he explains.
"Computers are allowing us to do this - taking air samples, taking water samples, we can tell you everything. So these databases we already use, and as computing power increases, our opportunities for analysis increase."
"What we're really doing is to look at all of the elephants across Africa - they're all split up now from each other, disjunct from each other."
"And we look at historical genetic connections, where corridors need to be created to connect them again, to see how these animals moved around 100 years ago. And all of that is told through genetics."
"Science advances," Dr Steve Boyes tells me.
"A lot of my expeditionary work, we consider ourselves as working for future scientists. We take simple water samples and have a water bank that we keep for scientists in 2050 who might be looking for something. The advance of science is moving really quickly."
Ghost Elephants is on Disney+ and premieres on National Geographic Wild (DStv 182) on Wednesday, 11 March at 18:00.
