Southern Africa is known for its wealthy file of prehistoric life, together with dinosaurs. However round 182 million years in the past, large volcanic eruptions unfold lava throughout a lot of the inland Karoo Basin, the place many dinosaurs as soon as lived. After this occasion, the fossil file within the area turns into surprisingly quiet through the Jurassic Interval (which lasted from 201 million to 145 million years in the past).
Latest discoveries are starting to alter that image. They present that dinosaurs continued to reside in southern Africa lengthy after these dramatic lava flows.
New Dinosaur Tracks on South Africa’s Coast
In 2025, scientists reported dinosaur tracks about 140 million years outdated on a distant stretch of shoreline in South Africa’s Western Cape. These had been the primary tracks from that point interval within the area (the Cretaceous, 145 million to 66 million years in the past).
Now, researchers have uncovered much more proof.
As ichnologists (finding out fossil tracks and traces), the staff recurrently works alongside the Western Cape coast close to Knysna. Most of their analysis focuses on tracks preserved in coastal aeolianites (cemented sand dunes) which are between 50,000 and 400,000 years outdated.
Throughout a go to in early 2025, they explored a small outcrop of rock fashioned within the early Cretaceous Interval. It’s the solely close by publicity of rock from that point, and far of it’s submerged at excessive tide. The staff hoped they may discover a theropod (dinosaur) tooth like one found there by a 13-year-old boy in 2017.
As a substitute, they discovered one thing much more thrilling. Linda Helm, a member of the group, noticed dinosaur tracks. A better look revealed greater than two dozen attainable footprints.
A Tiny Website With Large Significance
The Brenton Formation publicity may be very small, measuring not more than 40 meters lengthy and 5 meters large, with cliffs rising as much as 5 meters above the shore. Discovering dozens of tracks in such a restricted space means that dinosaurs had been pretty frequent on this area through the Cretaceous.
The researchers estimate the tracks are about 132 million years outdated. That makes them the youngest recognized dinosaur tracks in southern Africa (50 million years youthful than the youngest tracks reported from the Karoo Basin). Additionally they signify solely the second recognized set of Cretaceous dinosaur tracks in South Africa, and the second from the Western Cape. Some tracks are preserved on flat rock surfaces, whereas others seem in cross part inside the cliffs.
Southern Africa’s Dinosaur Fossil Document
Southern Africa holds an intensive file of vertebrate tracks and traces from the Mesozoic Period (the “Age of Dinosaurs,” from 252 million to 66 million years in the past, a time span that features the Jurassic), particularly within the Karoo Basin, which is stuffed with thick layers of sedimentary rock.
Tracks from the Triassic and Jurassic durations are frequent in Lesotho and close by areas of South Africa, together with the Free State and Jap Cape.
Nonetheless, later volcanic exercise created the Drakensberg Group, protecting many of those fossil-bearing layers with lava. Some dinosaurs could have briefly survived the preliminary eruptions, however they had been possible among the many final animals to reside within the Karoo Basin at the moment.
Because the supercontinent Gondwana started to interrupt aside close to the top of the Jurassic Interval and into the early Cretaceous Interval, smaller basins fashioned in what at the moment are the Western Cape and Jap Cape. These areas include restricted deposits from the Cretaceous.
Physique fossils from these deposits, primarily within the Jap Cape, embody a variety of dinosaurs. Amongst them are the primary dinosaur recognized within the southern hemisphere, now recognized to be a stegosaur, together with sauropods, a coelurosaurian, and younger iguanodontids.
In distinction, fossil stays from the Western Cape are uncommon. They embody just a few remoted sauropod tooth, scattered bones possible from a sauropod, and two finds close to Knysna: the theropod tooth found earlier and a part of a tibia.
Now, consideration is popping to footprints as an alternative of bones.
Dinosaurs of Knysna
The newly found tracks lie within the fashionable intertidal zone, the place they’re coated by seawater at excessive tide twice a day.
The atmosphere 132 million years in the past would have seemed very totally different from immediately’s shoreline, estuary, and developed panorama. At the moment, dinosaurs possible moved by tidal channels or alongside level bars (river seashores), surrounded by vegetation in contrast to something within the space now.
The tracks seem to have been made by a mixture of dinosaurs. These embody theropods and presumably ornithopods (each these sorts of dinosaur had been bipedal, strolling on two legs), in addition to attainable sauropods (enormous dinosaurs with very lengthy necks and really lengthy tails that had been quadrupedal, strolling on 4 legs). Theropods had been meat eaters, whereas ornithopods and sauropods had been plant eaters.
Figuring out the precise kind of dinosaur from footprints alone might be tough. Theropod and ornithopod tracks can look related, and sauropod tracks, though bigger, don’t all the time present clear toe impressions.
Due to these challenges, the researchers selected to not “over-interpret” the trackmakers. Their examine focuses on documenting the presence and abundance of dinosaur tracks from this time interval within the Brenton Formation.
Extra Discoveries Might Be Forward
The presence of early Cretaceous dinosaur tracks in each the Robberg Formation and the Brenton Formation means that extra websites should still be ready to be discovered. Different non-marine Cretaceous rock exposures exist within the Western Cape and Jap Cape.
Future systematic searches of those areas might reveal further dinosaur bones, extra tracks, and presumably traces of different historic animals.
Mark G. Dixon and Fred van Berkel of the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience, Nelson Mandela College, contributed to this analysis.
