The thin skin around the throat is yellow, and it has conical scales along the spine.

It inhabits rather dry habitat on the border between the Great and Little Karoo of eastern Northern Cape and western Free State provinces, South Africa.

This animal is occasionally considered a subspecies of the Cape dwarf chameleon (e.g. Klaver & Böhme 1997), but among the South African dwarf chameleons, these two are by no means closely related.

Rather, the Karoo dwarf chameleon belongs to a group of mostly short-tailed drab Bradypodion species which mostly inhabit semiarid to arid habitats.

The Karoo dwarf chameleon may actually be a subspecies of the latter; there appears to be significant gene flow between the two.