Page 38 - FourWaysGardens Issue 10 2021

Nature

Southern Africa has nine biomes, ranging including the bizarre early Jurassic around The Karoo Basin formed 320 million
from four desert biomes in the west to 190 million years ago. years ago when there was only one giant
the greener wetter biomes east of here. continent on Planet Earth – Pangea. The
Yet, whether rainforest or arid land, each The 300 page book provides a highly South Pole was then in the middle of the
biome is rich in its variety of creatures and readable account of this unbroken slab that eventually became Southern
plants. Deserts take up 50% of Southern 80 million year fossil record of the ancestors Africa.
Africa's land mass and the four desert of today's mammals and birds, which are
biomes have as many species as the moist being unearthed in the Karoo. His account Living Deserts contains spectacular
biomes. also includes the greatest extinction event photographs and many handy maps and
in the planet's history. drawn illustrations.
Mary and I described a visit to one of them in
2019 – the Tankwa Karoo, which despite its
baking, gravelly plains, is part of our largest
desert biome, the plant-rich ‘Succulent
Karoo’ which includes Namaqualand and
the Richtersveld. As a desert region of this
size, it has the largest number of succulent
plants in the world. This 150km wide belt
running parallel with the Atlantic coast
starts not very far north of Cape Town and
extends into Namibia. Its rainfall is between
20 and 290mm a year, yet it has 6 356
known species, many of them dependent
on the nightly fogs.

Biologists across the world are fascinated
by the Succulent Karoo which is considered
to be one of the planet's most interesting
and diverse arid ‘hot spots’.

One of the most interesting parts of
Lovegrove's book embraces his thoughts
on ‘global heating’ (he prefers this phrase
to ‘global warming’) which, he avers is a
threat to this nation that few South Africans
take seriously. Its quite rapid onset has
been scary and Lovegrove is concerned by
the changes he has witnessed during his
working life as a biologist.

The author devotes a chapter to a topic
that was underplayed in his previous book
on the desert biomes. The new chapter
provides a fascinating view of the Karoo's
beginnings and its extraordinary yield
of magnificent fossils of its prehistoric
population of vertebrates from the Middle
Permian around 270 million years ago and

Fourways Gardens • 36 • November 2021