page_title: Waterloo Farm lagerstätte
section_title: Site characteristics
hierarchical_section_title: Waterloo Farm lagerstätte / Site characteristics
caption_attribution_description: English: Waterloo Farm during excavation in 1985
context_page_description: The Waterloo Farm lagerstätte in South Africa is a unique fossil site which preserves a wide range of 360 million-year-old plant, invertebrate and vertebrate fossils from a high-latitudinal Gondwanan setting. Collectively they provide a holistic record of a Famennian estuarine ecosystem. The fossils are preserved as flattened silvery-white impressions in black shale.
context_section_description: Witpoort Formation black shales within the Eastern Cape often exhibit cyclical changes in composition, which likely reflect (potentially seasonal) fluctuations in water salinity. Water stratification within the estuarine lake frequently led to anoxic bottom waters, resulting in episodes of exceptional preservation.
  
  Witpoort Formation sediments were deeply buried due to continued basinal subsidence through the Carboniferous, and were subsequently metamorphosed during the massive Permian aged Cape Fold Belt orogenesis. Hundreds of millions of years of erosion and uplift brought the Waterloo Farm shales back up to near surface, they were exposed in 1985, in new road cuttings south of Makhanda/Grahamstown, during construction of a bypass road.
  
  On-site excavations were conducted in the 1990s, but the instability of the road cutting led to it being cut back in 1999 and in 2008. On both occasions large quantities of shale were rescued which provides for ongoing excavation. Decades of research has revealed the most important Late Devonian fossil site from what was the southern portion of Gondwana -a region incorporating present-day sub-saharan Africa, South America and western Antarctica. 
  Because the original fine black mud was often very low in oxygen, plants and animals rapidly buried in it sometimes left behind impressions of their soft parts. This is extremely rare in the fossil record which normally only preserves bones, teeth and other hard bits. Exceptionally, what is recorded is the remains of an entire estuarine ecosystem, from delicate waterweeds and seaweeds to small clams, baby fish and the bones of larger fish. Land plants which grew nearby are also preserved, from the remains of small undergrowth species to fronds from the earliest types of trees.
caption: Waterloo Farm during the excavation in 1985.
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