Two hundred years of palaeontological discovery: Review of research on the Early to Middle Devonian Bokkeveld Group (Cape Supergroup) of South Africa

Documentation of the palaeontological heritage of the Early to Middle Devonian Bokkeveld Group of South Africa has been recorded as far back as the early nineteenth century with the arrival of the first European settlers, merchants and explorers to the Cape region. Anecdotal evidence suggests that indigenous peoples had knowledge of fossils in the Bokkeveld Group from as early as the Middle-to-Late Stone Age. Within the first hundred years of the expansion of the Cape Colony the first geological maps of the Bokkeveld Group were produced alongside the first description of fossils as well as their Devonian age and marine origin. These early investigations provided a foundation for establishing faunal endemism common to South Africa, South America and the Falkland Islands. During the early twentieth century considerable progress was made in the description of fossil fauna of the Bokkeveld Group, most notably of invertebrates and plants. This research demonstrated that invertebrate fossils from the Bokkeveld Group, as well as those from time equivalents in South America and the Falkland Islands, were distinct from the Devonian Period elsewhere (e.g. Europe and North America). The role of fossils from the Bokkeveld Group proved critical in the formal designation and delineation of a broad region of endemism, the Malvinokaffric Realm that persisted at high subpolar-to-polar palaeolatitudes in southwestern Gondwana and extended from South Africa, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Antarctica and the Falkland Islands with possible elements in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and Ghana during the Emsian-Eifelian Stages. In the latter half of the twentieth century developments in understanding the sedimentology and stratigraphy of the Bokkeveld Group lead to the premise that the succession accumulated in a storm-and-wave dominated deltaic palaeoenvironment, and enabled inferences on the palaeoecology of the fossil taxa. During this period detailed revisions of numerous invertebrate and plant taxa were undertaken as well as the first descriptions of fossil fish. Research in the twenty-first century has shown a general decline in palaeontological interest, but developments are currently underway in refining the taxonomy of fossil echinoderms and fish from the Bokkeveld Group as well as understanding the Group's palaeoenvironmental history, geochronology and understanding the decline of the Malvinokaffric Realm in South Africa and its causation.