Springboks

This post should be about the rugby game last week but it's really about baby animals. Funny how I always think my photos are so much better than they really are. Click on the photos to make them bigger. There were a lot of springboks in the map areas this year. I also saw 5 bat eared foxes - in the same valley as Nicci and I spotted the pair a year ago - could it be the same foxes with 3 new kits? They definitely live there as the students who mapped that area saw them several times in the same place.





So you're wondering, "what is that unusual massive but friable pressure solution-cleaved greenish diamictite the springboks are grazing on?" Why, that's the Dwyka 3c ridge - one of the last coarse sequences of the Dwyka glaciation at the end of the Carboniferous period. Here's a nice fresh surface in the Witteberg River showing some late fracture cleavages cutting the clasts - don't worry, I had my NEW BRUNTON and I measured it to the nearest minute - and yes, it is post-folding. Wow.


Just for comparison, here's a more weathered outcrop of the fine-grained, laminated Dwyka 4f - including a characteristic big brown dolomite/phosphate nodule.