Boucle des Capitelles

Drinking water point.

Drinking water point.

Come and discover the footprints of the ancestors of today's mammals. An exceptional site in terms of heritage, not only European but worldwide. A small geological miracle for the preservation of these traces of the past!That was 35 to 40 million years ago! By then, dinosaurs had already disappeared some 20 million years ago. Before Man appeared on the scene, a new species made its entrance: the mammals of the Tertiary period. But what are they? If you let your imagination run wild, you'll find them related to the horse or the tapir, and distantly related to the hyena or the wild boar. In the land of the dinosaurs, they had failed to find their place. The great extinction of the dinosaurs allowed them to reappear. These are the animals whose traces you are about to discover. They are the ancestors of today's mammals. An exceptional heritage site Unlike dinosaur footprints, Tertiary mammal footprints are extremely rare on the earth's surface. There are around sixty such sites worldwide and fewer than a dozen in France, including three in the Luberon and two in the Gard. At Garrigues and Collorgues. A geological miracle For a long time, it was thought that these traces, collected by a sufficiently compact film of mud, had been "fixed" by a layer of sediment brought by the return of water. "We now know that this is not the case. It was an almost miraculous combination of geological events: the appearance of micro-organisms depositing a sort of bacterial mantle over the footprints in a very short space of time. This phenomenon preserved them in their original state, before new deposits covered them in turn, protecting them from erosion". If these animals can now be tracked, it's because "the sealing has ensured their complete preservation without disturbing the footprint on the ground. Download the document published by the Société d'Etude des Sciences Naturelles de Nîmes et du Gard, Muséum d'histoire naturelle et de la préhistoire, 13 boulevard de l'Amiral Courbet, 30000 Nîmes.