The tepuis or tabletop mountains are located in Venezuela which are really elevated plateaus. They are spectacular and rarely visited because of its waterfall, Angel Falls, the largest waterfall in the world.
Angel Falls was named after its discoverer, Jimmy Angel, who crashed his plane on the mountain in 1933. He was searching for the Golden Rivers on the summit. These golden rivers do not actually contain any gold (Au), but rather, they are stained gold by plant tendins.
Mt. Roraima has been searched and explored for its exposed beds of quartz crystals. The beds are exposed and unprotected due to flash floods and erosion. In the 1800’s explorers climbed to the top of Roraima in search of the beds of jewels.
Thousands of years of years ago, when all the continents were fused together to create Pangea, the super-continent, Africa and South America were connected. Eventually, things moved apart, and Africa and South America became their own continents. There is one very interesting thing about that, though. There is a frog that is native exclusively to the top of the tepuis. This frog’s DNA is much more like an African frog’s than like a South American frog’s, which suggests that it has been around since before the time of the dinosaurs (dinosaurs did not exist at the time of Pangea). Thus, a piece of African DNA ha been preserved inside a species in a remote and exclusive place.
Another wonder of the summit is the Carnivorous Plants. The genera Heliamphora and Drosera inhabit the ancient tepuis:
Heliamphora is a genus of pitcher plant native to South America and contains 23 species. The first to be discovered is Heliamphora Nutans. They are nick-named the sun pitcher due to an incorrect translation. It was thought that Heliamphora was derived from the Greek ‘Helios’ meaning sun. This was not true. Heliamphora was derived from Helos, meaning ‘marsh’. So really the translation would be Marsh Pitcher rather than Sun Pitcher.
Drosera is the one and only genus referring to the sundews. There are roughly 130 species of Drosera in the world. Multipule Species inhabit the tepuis of Venezuela, and the genus is one the most ubiquitous of the carnivorous plants.
The Venezuelan tepuis host some of the strangest and most fascinating rock formations in the world. Some
resemble animals and dinosaurs and are not man made. These rocks are not only some of the oddest, but they are some of the oldest as well, and some appear to be gravity-defying.
The tepuis of Venezuela are astonishingly magical and I hope to see them in person someday.