Rock hyraxes, these stocky mammals from southern Africa often called "dassies," are now revealing unexpected information through their most unusual behaviors. These animals with dense fur and short legs, which enjoy basking in the sun on rocky outcrops, have left behind fossilized traces that shed new light on the Pleistocene.
(A) the detached block containing the possible rock hyrax buttock drag mark.
(B) the possible rock hyrax buttock drag mark.
(C) 3D photogrammetric model of the possible buttock drag; the horizontal and vertical scales are in meters. , a specialized journal in paleontology, recently published a study detailing two major discoveries on the South African coast. The first is a track site approximately 76,000 years old, identified near Walker Bay by an animal tracking enthusiast. The second, located east of Still Bay and dating back about 126,000 years, features a unique imprint in the world: a drag mark 95 cm long and 13 cm wide (about 37 inches by 5 inches), with five parallel striations and a central protrusion.
This trace, interpreted as resulting from the friction of a hyrax's buttocks on the sand, might contain a coprolite, that is, a fossilized dropping.
Researchers from the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience used an optically stimulated luminescence dating method, which determines the age of sediments by measuring their last exposure to light. This technique confirmed the antiquity of the traces, ruling out other explanations such as the dragging of prey by a leopard or an elephant, as these scenarios would not explain the absence of associated tracks or the presence of the protrusion. The hyrax hypothesis is consistent because the buttock friction would have erased the footprints, a behavior still observed today in these animals.
A rock hyrax urinating next to piles of droppings on a rocky surface.
Credit: Ichnos (2025). DOI: 10.1080/10420940.2025.2546373
Beyond movement traces, hyraxes leave deposits of urine and droppings that solidify into formations called hyraceum. This substance, rich in calcium carbonate, accumulates on rocks and can persist for millennia. Traditionally used in medicine to treat conditions such as epilepsy or gynecological problems, hyraceum also constitutes a valuable natural archive, preserving fossil pollen and other clues about past climates and ecosystems.