Pension Rapmund                                                                          Swakopmund                                                                                  West Central Namibia

June 2, 2024

We continue our journey  through the Namib-Naukluft National Park to explore the agonizing  shapes yet pleasing “earthtones” of the fault formations.

We then leave the Naukluft Range to visit the Tsaris Mountains.  Here within the black and white striations lie some of the oldest shell fossils in the world: Namacalathus. The discovery of these fossils caused the Precambrian Cambrian boundary to be revised back in time. *

Finally we visit one of Namibia’s great natural wonders, the Sussusvlei Pan and the surrounding red desert sand dunes.

Please wander around the dunes with me.  If it’s too hot, we’ll take cover under the lovely and protective acacia trees.

I defer to this website for a more complete and yet pleasantly emotional reaction to the dunes: “some of the highest in the world.”

Jan

**A U–Pb zircon age from the fossiliferous rock in Namibia and Oman provides an age for the Namacalathus zone in the range from 549 to 542 Ma, which corresponds to the Late Ediacaran. Alongside Namapoikia and Cloudina, these organisms are the oldest known evidence in the fossil record of the emergence of calcified skeletal formation in metazoans, a prominent feature in animals appearing later in the Early Cambrian.

Shore et al. (2021) reported the first three-dimensional, pyritized preservation of soft tissue in Namacalathus hermanastes from the Nama Group (Namibia) and evaluate the implications of this finding for the knowledge of the phylogenetic relationships of this animal; they suggest it is an ancestor of Lophotrochozoan animals such as brachiopods and worms.