Geologically speaking, southern Africa is without equal, a treasure house of valuable minerals with a geological history dating back some 3 600 million years. In addition, the evolution of plants and animals, especially mammals and dinosaurs, is well preserved in the region, which also probably has the best record of the origin of modern man. This book provides a fascinating insight into that remarkable history: how southern Africa, and to some extent the world, came to be the way it is - how its mineral deposits formed, its life evolved and its landscape was shaped. Along the way readers will be enthralled by accounts of the Big Bang that marked the beginning of time and matter, by drifting and colliding continents, folding and fracturing of rocks, meteors colliding with the...
Terence McCarthy is emeritus Professor of Mineral Geochemistry at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has wide research interests in the earth sciences, including economic and environmental geology, geochemistry and geomorphology, and is a leading expert on the geology of wetlands.
He is co-author of The Story of Earth and Life and How on Earth?
Read moreProf. Bruce Rubidge is Distinguished Professor at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. Passionate about fossils, he is an authority on the formation of the Karoo Basin and the evolution of its fauna, especially the therapsid mammal-like reptiles and the stories they tell us about the ancestry of mammals. He currently lives in Graaff-Reinet where he has established the Karoo Origins fossil centre.
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