WEST COAST FOSSIL PARK

50 km east of Saldanha, the Elandsfontein site is world famous for its fossils. In 1953, Ronald Singer, a palaeontologist at the South African Museum, discovered a graveyard of extinct species in the dunes. Around what was once a lake, he was able to collect more than 6,000 fossilized bones between 150,000 and 75,000 years old, as well as the bones of the "Saldanha Man", of the Homo sapiens type. A little further north, the Langebaanweg phosphate deposit is renowned for its wealth. When mining ceased in 1995, the site was classified as a national monument.