fossil beds, capturing the transitions of continents, species and climate.
Palaeontologists have spent generations unearthing this record. Among them is Professor Bruce Rubidge, whose work has helped reveal how this landscape teaches us about the origins of life, extinction and survival. Thanks to discoveries made right here, in the same valleys and ridgelines that you will cross during the Nedbank Gravel Burn, we now understand that the Karoo is one of the most unique historical sites in the world.
When you’ re winding your way uphill, or when you’ re sitting in the Burn Camp beneath a canopy of stars, think of the time that has passed. If ever an event was going to make you ponder your existence or the eternal, existential question of‘ why’, it’ s going to be the Nedbank Gravel Burn.
Karoo magic: No light pollution means crystalclear views of the night sky; mountains are chronicles in stone, their layers telling a story that goes back over millions of years.
THE PICNIC THAT CHANGED PERCEPTIONS
In the 1930s, a young girl came home from school and asked her father, Karoo farmer Sidney Rubidge,“ What is a fossil?”
He was uncertain but thought it had something to do with bones embedded in rock. So the two of them went out on a picnic to explore. That day, they found a fossilised skull in the hillside, with enormous teeth that resembled a prehistoric horse.
Excited by the find, Sidney contacted Robert Broom, a respected palaeontologist working in Johannesburg. Expecting the fossil to be perhaps a thousand years old, Sidney was stunned when Broom told him it was closer to 250 million years old.“ It completely blew my grandfather’ s mind,” says Bruce Rubidge, Sidney’ s grandson and one of the world’ s leading experts on Karoo fossils.
When Broom asked to take the specimen back to Johannesburg, Sidney famously replied,“ If it has been here for 250 million years, I do not think it wants to leave now.”
That discovery changed the
course of the Rubidge family story and of palaeontology in South Africa. Over the following decade, Sidney uncovered more than 850 fossil skulls, including 107 holotypes, which are the defining specimens of their species. These formed the basis of what is now the Karoo Origins Fossil Centre in Graaff Reinet. Today, Bruce continues that work, showing the world how the Karoo’ s layers reveal the deep story of life on earth.
19 NEDBANK GRAVEL BURN