The Free State’s only national park, 340 square kilometres of deeply eroded sandstone on the Lesotho border, named for the way the last of the sun lands on the cliffs either side of the valley. A farmer called J.N.R. van Reenen gave it the name in 1875. Most people come for the Brandwag rock and the ochre cliffs, or for the San paintings in the shelters, and miss that the same rock has given up dinosaur eggs and skeletons, including embryos still inside their shells. The park was proclaimed in 1963 at under 48 square kilometres, grew in 1981 and 1988, and absorbed the neighbouring QwaQwa National Park in 2007. Eland, zebra and mongoose are easier to see than the fossils, and the beauty of the ground is the honest reason to go.
Dinosaur eggs, embryos and skeletons in the sandstone · Late Triassic to Early Jurassic
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
South Africa
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