To enable to move more quickly through tight tunnels, the body has few visible external features; for example, there are no pinnae or scrotum, and the penis retracts into a concealed sheath.

[4] Unlike its relative the naked mole-rat, the Cape dune species has a thick pelt of soft fur over its entire body.

[4] Like other blesmols, the Cape dune mole rat has a relatively low body temperature for its size, of about 35 °C (95 °F), and is not able to tolerate cold weather above ground.

Their diet consists largely of grass and sedges pulled down into the burrow by the roots, although they also eat bulbs and tubers from local plants such as Albuca and cape tulips.

While most other blesmols dig through soil using their large, chiselling incisor teeth, the loose, sandy soil of their native environment makes this approach less effective for Cape dune mole-rats, which instead dig primarily with their claws, kicking the sand behind their bodies and eventually pushing it up to the surface as a molehill.

Litter mates frequently spar with one another, and disperse to establish their own burrow systems after around two months, by which time they have already reached nearly half the adult body weight.

In 1788 the species was described again, both by the also German Johann Friedrich Gmelin, who called it Mus maritimus, and by the Swedish naturalist and Cape explorer Carl Peter Thunberg, who gave it the name Marmota africana.

The Scotsman Andrew Smith classified the species, as described by Gmelin, with the genus Georychus, making the new combination G. maritimus.

Because of the large numbers of fossils found together, it has been suggested that this early species was social, like most other blesmols, but unlike its presumed living descendants; however, other possible explanations for this taphonomy exist.