Volcanic eruptions were supposed to have ended southern Africa’s dinosaurs. Footprints say otherwise.

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Southern Africa’s dinosaurs were supposed to have disappeared under lava 182 million years ago. Footprints in a coastal rock near Knysna show they were still there 50 million years later.

Around 182 million years ago, something catastrophic happened to southern Africa’s dinosaurs. Massive volcanic eruptions poured lava across the inland Karoo Basin, burying the fossil-rich layers where dinosaurs had lived. After that, the region’s dinosaur record goes almost completely silent. For scientists studying prehistoric life in the area, those missing millions of years became one of palaeontology’s most stubborn gaps.

New footprints found on a rocky beach near the town of Knysna are beginning to fill it.

A team of researchers working along the Western Cape coast has discovered more than two dozen dinosaur tracks in a small coastal outcrop, dating to around 132 million years ago. That makes them the youngest dinosaur tracks ever found in southern Africa, roughly 50 million years younger than the youngest tracks previously known from the Karoo Basin. The findings are published in the South African Journal of Science.

The discovery was accidental. The team, which specialises in studying fossil footprints and traces, visits the Knysna coast regularly to document much younger tracks preserved in ancient sand dunes. During a field visit in early 2025, they decided to check a small patch of rock nearby that had formed in the early Cretaceous period. It was the only exposure of rock from that age in the area, and much of it disappears under the sea at high tide. They had hoped to find a dinosaur tooth, like one that had turned up at the same location when a 13-year-old boy spotted it in 2017.

Instead, team member Linda Helm noticed something in the rock surface. Footprints. A closer look revealed more than two dozen possible tracks packed into a site no larger than 40 metres by five metres.

The tracks were made by a mix of dinosaurs. Some appear to be from theropods, the group that includes carnivorous two-legged hunters. Others may be from ornithopods, plant-eating dinosaurs also built for walking on two legs.

A few larger impressions could belong to sauropods, the enormous long-necked dinosaurs that walked on four legs. Identifying tracks precisely is difficult, and the researchers chose not to over-interpret the evidence, focusing instead on what the density of footprints reveals: that dinosaurs were moving through this area regularly, 132 million years ago, when the landscape looked nothing like it does today.

At that time, the Knysna coastline was not a coastline at all. It was a system of river channels and tidal flats, thick with vegetation. Dinosaurs moved through the mud of riverbanks and point bars, leaving impressions that slowly hardened over geological time, were buried, and then re-exposed over millions of years of erosion. Today those same impressions sit in the intertidal zone, covered by seawater twice a day.

The volcanic lava flows that disrupted the Karoo Basin did not wipe out all dinosaur life in southern Africa. The new tracks are the latest piece of evidence showing that dinosaurs continued to survive in the region, living in coastal and river environments that the lava never reached. The Western Cape and Eastern Cape, which formed from smaller basins as the ancient supercontinent Gondwana began to break apart, escaped the worst of those eruptions. Dinosaur body fossils, including teeth and bones, have turned up there before. Now there are footprints too.

The researchers believe more sites are likely waiting to be found. Other exposures of early Cretaceous rock exist along the Western and Eastern Cape coastline, and most have never been systematically searched for tracks. The Brenton Formation, where these tracks were found, had not been considered a likely site before the team’s accidental discovery.

The broader picture is of a dinosaur population that survived a catastrophic volcanic event and continued to roam southern Africa for at least another 50 million years, leaving evidence that erosion is only now bringing back into the light.

Sources

Helm, C.W., Dixon, M.G. and van Berkel, F. “Early Cretaceous dinosaur tracks from the Brenton Formation, Knysna, Western Cape, South Africa.” South African Journal of Science (2026). DOI: 10.17159/sajs.2026/22809 https://doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2026/22809

Helm, C.W. et al. “First record of Cretaceous dinosaur tracks from the Western Cape, South Africa.” African Invertebrates (2025). DOI: 10.1080/10420940.2025.2463341 https://doi.org/10.1080/10420940.2025.2463341

“Dinosaur in Knysna — full story.” Knysna-Plett Herald, 11 July 2017. https://www.knysnaplettherald.com/News/Article/Local-News/dinosaur-in-knysna-full-story-20170711

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