A
leading American palaeontologist once referred to the Karoo of South Africa
as one of the great natural wonders of the world, far outshadowing such
man-made wonders as the pyramids of Egypt, or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Yet, to the average South African, the word ‘Karoo’ conjures
up visions of hot, dry plains, bare hills and, very often, a long and monotonous
highway to be traveled over as quickly as possible. Those more familiar
with the Karoo can speak of the fascination of a wide land of ever changing
character, and of unusual animal and plant life.
There is, however, another Karoo
of which few people are aware, a Karoo of hundreds of millions of years
ago which can be recreated and understood only by piecing together a host
of tantalizingly incomplete shreds of evidence. The Karoo of that time,
populated by a succession of strange, long extinct animals and plants, is
in a sense a period of time frozen into the rocks of South Africa and preserved
as a unique storehouse of knowledge of past life on earth. This is the Karoo
that the American palaeontologist was writing about,(1)
the Karoo in which Mount Melsetter’s Karoo House is situate.
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| About 250
million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, something killed some
90 percent of the planet’s species.Evidence of this extinction lies
preserved in sediments containing fossils of the extinction’s victims.
These sediments, and fossils, are rare and often inaccessible.One site that
preserves the extinction’s victims is in the South African scrubland
known as the Karoo(2). Roger Smith, a palaeontologist
at the South African Museum says: “The Karoo is the kind of place
where people fall asleep at the wheel, but it may be the best place to see
the terrestrial realm’s transition from the Permian to the Triassic
period.”(3) |
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| Dr. Billy
de Klerk, Curator, Earth Sciences at the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, and
a licenced palaeontologist, writes in our Visitor’s Book “A
treasure trove for palaeontologists!”. He has extracted from the banks
of the Great Brak River here on Mount Melsetter a fossilized Lystrosaurus
murrayi, a mammal-like reptile belonging to a group known as synapsids,
the Earth’s first great dynasty of land vertebrates(4).
On the river banks, and in the river bed, of the Great Brak running through
Mount Melsetter, a keen eye can find many fossil remnants of the era. Dr
de Klerk’s Lystrosaurus murrayi is now an exhibit in the Albany Museum’s
permanent display of Karoo Fossils, one of only three such displays in South
Africa. |
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