There’s ancient treasure on the Wild Coast. It’s delicate, old. The vast Mzamba Cretaceous Deposits, a rare collection of 80-million-year-old fossils, is situated on the border of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. It’s easy to walk right by, but to the trained eye of Benny Mbotho the beach turns into a scratch patch of natural relics. He reveals its secrets: an extinct ammonite here, a fossilised Strelitzia there. All you have to do is look closer.





When Mbotho went to the beach as a child, he didn’t realise he was walking on the sands of history. At the age of nine, playing drums on the rocks, an older friend told him he was in fact sitting on the fossilised shell of a long-gone sea turtle. Mbotho looked around him, and saw that there was an entire world to be discovered right in front of him, from remnants of shark teeth to giant clams.



