Karoo Supergroup

The Karoo Supergroup is the most widespread stratigraphic unit in Africa south of the Kalahari Desert, made up predominantly of shales and sandstones that accumulated over roughly 120 million years from the Late Carboniferous through the Early Jurassic. It covers nearly two-thirds of present-day southern Africa, encompassing all of Lesotho, nearly all of South Africa's Free State province, and large parts of the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, with further outcrops in Namibia, Eswatini, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and other former Gondwana localities. Its sedimentary layers reach a maximum cumulative thickness of 12 kilometers, with the overlying basaltic lavas of the Drakensberg Group adding at least another 1.4 kilometers on top. The Supergroup is internationally renowned for its fossil record of plants, insects, fish and diverse tetrapods, especially therapsids, along with temnospondyl amphibians, dinosaurs and trace fossils, and its biostratigraphy serves as the international standard for correlating nonmarine strata from the Permian through the Jurassic worldwide. This entity documents the Karoo Supergroup specifically as a geological formation, a vast southern African sedimentary and volcanic sequence.