. Annals of the South African Museum = Annale van die Suid-Afrikaanse Museum. Natural history. A NEW DICYNODONT ANCESTOR FROM THE UPPER ECCA 119 The fact that Du Toit's views regarding the climatic conditions which prevailed during Ecca and Beaufort times were generally accepted by geologists and palaeontologists alike was probably a contributing factor why such scant attention was paid to Broom's claims that the terrestrial forms Eccasaurus priscus (Broom 1905(7, 1912) and Archaeosuchus cairncrossi (Broom 1905&, 1909) came from Ecca beds. The announcement (Barry 1972) of the discovery by
. Annals of the South African Museum = Annale van die Suid-Afrikaanse Museum. Natural history. A NEW DICYNODONT ANCESTOR FROM THE UPPER ECCA 119 The fact that Du Toit's views regarding the climatic conditions which prevailed during Ecca and Beaufort times were generally accepted by geologists and palaeontologists alike was probably a contributing factor why such scant attention was paid to Broom's claims that the terrestrial forms Eccasaurus priscus (Broom 1905(7, 1912) and Archaeosuchus cairncrossi (Broom 1905&, 1909) came from Ecca beds. The announcement (Barry 1972) of the discovery by Mr Roy Oosthuizen of the farm Zwartskraal, Prince Albert district, of some 50 nodules containing fossil remains in beds which are Ecca (Lower Middle Permian) according to present stratigraphical definition, seemed to warrant the reopening of the "barren Ecca' theory. The southern or 'Green' facies in which the latest fossils were found was deposited within the Karroo Geosyncline. The strata occur south of a line drawn from Calvinia (latitude 3i°3o'S) in the west to East London (latitude 33°S) in the east, and range in thickness from 2 000 metres near Prince Albert to over 3 000 metres north of Grahamstown. The beds are involved in the Cape foldings and consist of green, bluish, olive and variegated mudstones and argillaceous sandstones and of a blue-green and yellow fine- to medium-grained hard and sometimes quartzitic spheroidally-weathering sandstones, but without any coarse or conglomeratic kinds. Because of the Cape folding the strata are in places tilted up vertically and even overturned towards the north as between Prince Albert and Klipplaat Du Toit 1954). Duplication of exposures of the same beds are commonly found, thus complicating the determination of fossil horizons, but on site investigations of the layers and folding patterns at Zwartskraal show the fossil sites to lie within the Upper Ecca (Figs 2 and 3). Lower Beaufort exposure is limited to a narrow proj
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