The south coast of South Africa’s Western Cape province is a rich source of fossil tracks and traces – clues suggesting what this environment may have been like many thousands of years ago.
We’re a research group from the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience who have been finding and documenting these tracks since 2007. So far we have identified more than 400 tracksites left by vertebrates, including pangolins, giraffe, snakes, rock hyraxes, crocodiles and elephants. They include a variety of marks, from footprints to butt-drag impressions and even traces of sound vibrations. Some of these animals have never been found in the vicinity through the body fossil record, only from their tracks.
Most have been dated to the Pleistocene era, between 130,000 and 90,000 years in age, using a technique that measures how long ago grains of sand were exposed to light. Some of the fossil tracks and traces are the first of their kind ever found anywhere.
