Traces in the stone

When we talk about fossils - the remains of extinct creatures, often millions of years old - we often think of fossilized bones or shells. However, just as often (or even more often) other fossilized traces of life can be found - for example, burrow marks, feeding marks and traces of animal movement, which are preserved as trace fossils during the transformation of a deposit into a rock.

With vertebrates, arthropods, and other animal groups moving onto the land over 350 million years ago, their traces started to be left and later found in the deposits of lakes and rivers. As it is not possible to observe extinct animals making tracks in the past, track researchers (Ichnologists) are faced with the task of finding out from the shape and size of the tracks which animals made them, how the tracks were made, and how they have been preserved.

With the special exhibition “Traces in Stone”, the museum devoted itself in particular to the footprints and burial traces of the first amphibians, the primeval dinosaurs and the mammal-like reptiles that lived in the Palaeozoic era around 350 to 250 million years ago. Visitors were able to experience the diversity of early dinosaur tracks and their producers by means of fossil plates with fossilized tracks as well as skeletal remains and lifelike animal models of their producers.

The rich fossil sites in central Germany, such as the Bromacker near Tambach-Dietharz in the Thuringian Forest and the Mammendorf quarry near Magdeburg, formed the basis of the exhibition.