It is an ancient, fossil rich land with the largest variety of succulents found anywhere on earth. For those who care to look, the story of the evolution of mammals from reptiles is here recorded in stone. And the story is 190 to 500 million years old. Game animals, to whom these plains and mountains are home, make of the Great Karoo an outpost of nature where man's intrusion is still but a light touch. Here are found many species of plains game, hyrax, Hartman mountain zebra, fallow deer, wild ostrich, guinea fowl, the Egyptian goose and lynx.
Bird life is abundant.
The endangered black rhinoceros and the riverine rabbit have also been reestablished in the Karoo. At the end of the last century one of the largest fighting forces ever to leave the shores of Imperial Britain arrived at the Cape. These soldiers, with all the paraphernalia of battle, moved across the plains of the Great Karoo to engage the Boers in the Anglo Boer War, last of the gentlemen's wars. The Great Karoo is also a place of pioneers. Dr Emil Hoffa, founder of the modern science of orthopaedics.