Article: The Karoo supergroup: a geological and palaeontological superlative.

The Karoo basin of South Africa covers approximately two-thirds of the land surface of South Africa (fig. 1) and preserves a maximum thickness of 12 kilometers (Johnson et al. 1997). This sequence of predominantly sedimentary rocks preserves a world-class assemblage of fossils, spanning a time-range from the Late Carboniferous to the Early Jurassic.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The first fossil reptiles from the Karoo were found in the 1850s by Andrew Geddes Bain and were the first specimens of a new group of "reptiles" called the therapsids, which were recognized as being the distant ancestors of mammals. Since the 1850s thousands more tetrapod fossils have been ...

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