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The Conversation
Miengah Abrahams, Lecturer, University of Cape Town

Dinosaur tracksite in Lesotho: how a wrong turn led to an exciting find

An artistic impression of the various dinosaur species that once roamed the Roma Valley. Akhil Rampersadh

I am a poor navigator. This is not an easy thing for a field geologist to admit. We need to be able to find our planned area of interest in good time and make our way back to our potentially hidden and distant vehicles at the end of the day. It’s especially true that I am a poor navigator when I need to use nondescript bushes, the distant hill shape, and the odd fallen boulder as reference points.

So it was no surprise when I led my MSc student Loyce Mpangala and our PhD candidate field assistant Akhil Rampersadh astray in Lesotho’s Roma Valley. We were walking back to our car after looking at a dinosaur tracksite that I’d visited before. The tracksite, which is marked on Google Maps as an attraction, was on the other side of a sparsely populated hill with numerous informal walkways, overlooking the National University of Lesotho.

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