Millipedes

Millipedes: Two sets of legs per segment. Feed on decomposing plant material.

Cenitpedes: One set of legs per segment. Active predators.

Millipedes here come in all colors. Red....

Black (The red below her is a lava which she was feeding in the hollow of this tree trunk)
Yellow

Brown

and mating. LOL!!

Isn't he just the cutest? (Mantis)

We have many kind of mantis here and this is a baby of the Giant Mantis which gets to be about 5 inches in body length. The tail end eventually straightens out when it gets its first wings. It is a very common species and feeds mainly off caterpillars.
All mantids have large heads and compound eyes.

The female lays her eggs in cocoons like this which is mainly attached to branches. The cocoon is about 1 inch in length but there are hundreds of eggs in them.

Sterkfontein Caves - Part 6 Final

The caves form part of the Isaack Stegmann Nature Reserve and are owned by the University of the Witwatersrand.
They are open to the public from February to December each year, six days a week. Tours are conducted every half-hour.

Next to the caves is the Robert Broom site museum, housing exhibits of immensely ancient animal and bird life.

Bones and breccia in caves
Solution and roof collapses create entrances to the caves in the form of vertical shafts. Soil, rocks, bones and vegetation fell in from the surface – the animals and plants from which fossils formed did not actually live in the cave.

The bones which found their way into these shafts were often just fragments left by the activities of predators and scavengers around the shaft entrances. But sometimes – far less often – a whole animal would fall down a cavity to be fossilized in the infill. The famous australopithecine skeleton “Little Foot”, which was found deep inside a Sterkfontein grotto, is an example of this.

Over time, the material that fell into the shafts built up to form talus cones, which look like giant inverted ice-cream cones, on the cave floor. These formations were cemented by lime-charged water to form concrete-like breccia a type of rock. Bones within these talus cones were mineralized by calcium carbonate and stained with manganese and iron from the dolomite soil.

Sometimes floor collapses into lower caves or erosion by surface water disrupted the stratified layers, mixing deposits. This means that even if some deposits are deeper than others, they are not necessarily older than those nearer the surface.

The bulk of the Sterkfontein cave deposits were not disrupted in this way. The University of the Witwatersrand geologist Professor Tim Partridge classified the deposits from oldest to youngest as geological Members 1-6 from the Sterkfontein formation. The infills span a period from 4.2 million years ago to less than 200,000 years ago. The different infills have characteristic fossil and/or artifact (stone tool) content.

Sterkfontein Caves - Part 5

Many beautiful structures – including stalagmites and stalactites – form inside caves as carbonic acid carrying limestone, drips through cave roofs onto their floors. Structures inside a cave may take millions of years to develop.

Some of the geological structures which may develop inside a cave include:

Speleothem
“Speleothem: is a general geological term for a calcium carbonate deposit in a cave, including formations such as stalactites, stalagmites and flowstones.

Flowstones
Flowstones are speleothems on the walls and floors of a cave formed from a gradual flow of water over a relatively broad area.

Stalactite
The term stalactite comes from the Greek word stalaktos, which means “dripping” because these other-worldly formations “drip” from the roofs of limestone caves. Essentially, water reacts to carbon dioxcide to form carbonic acid. It then seeps slowly through the roof of the cave, depositing calcium carbonate which hardens and build up over time to form a stalactite.

Stalagmite
Stalagmites are corresponding formations on the floor of the cave to stalactites. Stalagmites rise from the floor in a build up of calcium carbonate over time, from mineral-bearing water dripping from the roof of the cave. The term stalagmite comes from the Greek word stalagma, to “drop”.

Column
Sometimes stalactites and stalagmites meet, forming a pillar or column of rock-hard calcium carbonate.

Helictite

A formation of calcium carbonate in a cave that grows in a twisted, curled fashion, like a helix (hence the name), seemly defying the laws of gravity.

Sterkfontein Caves - Part 4

Sterkfontein Caves - Part 3

Part of the complex consists of six cathedral chambers, largest of which is the dripstone-decorated Hall of Elephants, 23 m (75 ft) high and 91 m (300 ft) long.
Other chambers include Fairy Chamber, Bridal Arch, Lumbago Alley and the Graveyard.

Dr Robert Broom, of the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, began excavations of the cave in 1936 and made several discoveries of bones and other fossils.

His great find came in 1947 – the exceptionally well-preserved skull of a species of early man-ape which he called Plesianthropus transvaalensis, who lived about two million years ago.

The skull was that of a female and became known as ‘Mrs Ples’.

The species has subsequently been reclassified as Australopithecus africanus when the skull was positively recognized as belonging to the same species as the 'ape-child' skull discovered by Professor Raymond Dart at Taung in the northern Cape in 1924.

Sterkfontein Caves - Part 2

Discovered by an Italian prospector Guigimo Martinaglia, who was searching for gold and lime in 1896, this labyrinth of interconnected caverns was formed over millions of years by underground waters slowly dissolving the dolomitic rock.

Now the water table has dropped and the spectacular eroded shapes of the dolomite can be seen as one walks through a vast chamber to an under ground lake which fills other extensive caves beneath its surface.

Its tranquil, crystal-clear waters extend some distance into unexplored chambers.

Several interesting dripstone formations are to be seen; although, sadly, many of the cave's more spectacular stalactites and stalagmites were removed or damaged by early limestone-mining activities.

In one part of the cave, visited by tourists, is a portion of an ancient consolidated infill that collapsed about 2 million years ago from an older and higher cave.

Above this infill is a long shaft which leads up to massive deposits which are currently being excavated by scientists.

Other deposits being worked in one part of the underground cave system date back to 3 million years.