Southern Africa is world-renowned for its fossil record of creatures that lived in the very distant past, including dinosaurs. But, about 182 million years ago, a huge eruption of lava covered much of the landscape (the inland Karoo Basin) where most of the dinosaurs roamed. After that, the dinosaur fossil record in the region goes abruptly quiet for the Jurassic Period (which lasted from 201 million to 145 million years ago).
Two exciting recent discoveries confirm, however, that there is more to find of dinosaurs that lived in southern Africa a long time after those lava flows.
First, dinosaur tracks aged around 140 million years were reported in 2025 on a remote stretch of the coast in South Africa’s Western Cape province. These were the first to be found in the region from that geological time period (the Cretaceous, 145 million to 66 million years ago).
Now, we’ve found more.
Our work as a team of ichnologists (studying fossil tracks and traces) often takes us to the Knysna area of the Western Cape coast, where we investigate tracks in coastal aeolianites (cemented sand dunes) in the age range of 50,000 to 400,000 years old.
During one of these visits, early in 2025, we decided to visit a small patch of rock that formed during the early Cretaceous Period. It’s the only place in the vicinity where rock of this age is exposed, and much of it is underwater at high tide. We thought we might be lucky enough to find a theropod (dinosaur) tooth like the one discovered in those rocks by a 13-year-old boy in 2017.
We were pleasantly surprised when, instead Linda Helm, a member of our party, told us in a state of excitement that she had found dinosaur tracks. Further examination of the deposits revealed more than two dozen probable tracks.
This so-called Brenton Formation exposure is tiny, no more than 40 metres in length and five metres in width, with cliffs rising from the shore to a maximum of five metres. To find dozens of tracks in this small area suggests a considerable dinosaur presence in the region during the Cretaceous.
In our study we estimate that these tracks are 132 million years old, making them the youngest known dinosaur tracks in southern Africa (50 million years younger than the youngest tracks reported from the Karoo Basin). They form the second record of dinosaur tracks from the South African Cretaceous, and the second record from the Western Cape province. Some of them occur on rock surfaces, while others occur in the cliffs in profile.
Dinosaur fossil treasures
Southern Africa has a wealth of vertebrate tracks and traces from the Mesozoic Era (the “Age of Dinosaurs”, from 252 million to 66 million years ago, a time span that includes the Jurassic) in the Karoo Basin – a vast inland basin filled with thick piles of sedimentary deposits.
Dinosaur tracks from the Triassic and Jurassic periods are abundant in Lesotho and surrounding areas in South Africa’s Free State and Eastern Cape provinces.
But vast quantities of lava, now referred to as the Drakensberg Group, overlaid these track-bearing deposits as a result of large-scale eruptions. A few dinosaurs appear to have briefly survived the initial effects of the lava flows, and were probably among the last vertebrates to inhabit the Karoo Basin.
About the authors
Charles Helm and Willo Stear are both Research Associates for the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience, Nelson Mandela University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Then, as the supercontinent of Gondwana fragmented at the end of the Jurassic Period and in the early Cretaceous Period, limited Cretaceous terrestrial deposits formed in rift basins in what are now the Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa.
Dinosaur body fossils have been reported from those deposits, mostly from the Eastern Cape. They include the first dinosaur to be identified in the southern hemisphere, now identified as a stegosaur, as well as sauropods, a coelurosaurian and iguanodontid hatchlings and juveniles.
The only examples of dinosaur skeletal material from the Western Cape are a few isolated sauropod teeth, disarticulated bones of a probable sauropod, and two cases from the Knysna area: the theropod tooth mentioned above and a portion of a tibia.
But now we’re after their tracks.
Dinosaurs of Knysna
The tracks we found at Knysna are in the modern intertidal zone, where the high tide covers most of them twice a day.
It would be difficult to imagine a more different scene, 132 million years ago, than the spectacular coastline, magnificent estuary, and lots of development by humans that we encounter today. Back in the early Cretaceous, many dinosaurs would have been visible in the area, perhaps inhabiting tidal channels or point bars (river beaches). The vegetation would also have been very different from that of today.
The Brenton Formation tracks were made by theropods, possibly ornithopods (both these kinds of dinosaur were bipedal, walking on two legs), and possibly sauropods (huge dinosaurs with very long necks and very long tails that were quadrupedal, walking on four legs). Theropods were meat eaters, while ornithopods and sauropods were plant eaters.
It can be challenging at times to distinguish theropod tracks from ornithopod tracks. Sauropod tracks are larger and don’t always have clear digit impressions, also sometimes making them hard to identify with confidence.
In most cases, we have chosen not to “over-interpret” which types of dinosaurs made which tracks, as they just aren’t clear enough. Our research paper simply intends to document that dinosaur tracks of this age are relatively plentiful in the Brenton Formation.
The fact that early Cretaceous dinosaur tracks have now been identified in both the Robberg Formation and the Brenton Formation suggests that more may be found if a search is conducted in appropriate places. There are a number of other exposures of non-marine Cretaceous rocks in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape. Systematic exploration of these deposits is now indicated, in the hope that in addition to finding more dinosaur skeletal material, more dinosaur tracks (and potentially those of other vertebrates) will be identified.