01/04/2026
THE DINOSAUR TRACKS ON UNIONDALE, PAUL ROUX
On the farm Uniondale in the Paul Roux District, a large block of Clarens Formation Sandstone has come loose from a high cliff on the mountain, just underneath the lavas on top, and rolled down to lie on the flat land below. This block contains parts of the fossilised trackways of at least two fairly large meat-eating dinosaurs of a kind which roamed this area of the Free State during the Early Jurassic Period, about 185 million years ago.
meat-eater
We don't know which dinosaur left these footprints because no bones of the animal have yet been found, but we do know it was a two-legged meat-eater. It was probably very much like animals of similar size known from rocks of similar age in the Southwestern United States of America, the medium-sized dinosaur, Dilophosaurus Wetherilli (a distant and more primitive relative of the later giant meat-eater like the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex).
The main track way shows five successive footprints (left-right-left-right-left) of an animal walking from the lower right to the upper left of the sandstone block. The "stride" of the animal (from one right footprint to the next right footprint) is nearly 3 meters, indicating that it was an animal with long back legs. The fact that there are no front footprint shows that the animal walked upright on its two back legs, leaving only the three-toed, bird-like prints of its hind feet. These animals lived in the desert, which covered large parts of Gondwana during late Karoo times. Soon after these rocks were laid down, the surface of this part of the earth erupted with great outpourings of volcanic lava as Gondwana began to break up 180 million years ago.
Interesting about these footprints is that some American scientists tried to remove the rock for further study. Luckily, they could not succeed.
All that is left of their attempts are the holes they drilled for the removal of the rock.
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