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GERMAN SAUROPODS SINCE 1999:
WE MOVED!! GO TO : www.jurassic-harz.de.vu
"Not in wildest dreams had I pictured such a mass of
fossils, such a paleontological jackpot"! The words spoken by R.T. Bird are for sure very near to the thoughts of Holger Lüdtke, a selftaught palaeontologist and fossil hunter, who discovered in 1998 the first (Sauropod) Dinosaur bones from a working Quarry in Northern Germany.
Luckily he contacted Raymund Windolf at the "Münchehagen Dinosaur Openair Museum" and, in April 1999, our wildest dreams came true! Our small team went out to dig for dinosaurs! In the following three years we were able to uncover a large, multi-aged herd of an new type of sauropod (close to Brachiosaurus) dating from the Upper Jurassic(Kimmeridgian); 150 million years old. So far we´ve could counted 15 individuals ( more than 1000 complete bones! ) of various ages and sizes. Some skeletons are partly articulated. And the biggest prize in the jackpot is the exellently preserved skull bones, which are generally fragile parts of the skeleton! In April 2002 we were able to reconstruct the FIRST sauropod dinosaur skull from Europe found within nearly 200 years of dinosaur hunting.Not only did we find remains of this sauropod herd; there were also bones of a second new sauropod (close to Diplodocus)complete skeletons of dwarf crocodiles, an articulated pterosaur skeleton, theropod bones and teeth, like crocodiles such as Steneosaurus, and complete turtles. Even a very rare turtle skull was recovered ! This was success beyond our wildest dreams. Naturally, it wasn´t accomplished without weeks and months of tedious work, nor without many helping hands! More than twenty volunteers gave their holidays, and helped enthusiastically with the excavation, preparation, diagnosis and discribtion of the fossils from our dinosaur quarry.
A big THANK YOU to all of them!
---------NEWS--------
DINO-FOOTPRINTS ! A EXTRAORDINARY DISCOVERY!
In 2003 more than five complete tridactyle prints were uncovered by rain and wind in our quarry.Holger Lüdtke, one of our volunteers discovered this trackway. Now our Dinosaursite is one of the very rare places where footprints and Dinosaurbones have been found together.
Mario Schoppa will work on this tracks.
APRIL 2003: we opened a new preparation laboratory in Kaiserslautern (Germany), which is also part of a large dinosaur exhibition! WERNER FINK is the preparator, and he´s already been busy with preparing many fantastic dinosaurbones from our quarry. Fortunatly, he also has much of our unprepared material too. This was just as well given what happend in OCTOBER 2003! See below for details.
(Werner : keep up the good work!! :-) )
OCTOBER 2003: was a very bad month for our Team! Senselessly, a very ill person started a fire in our exhibition hall. The blaze during the night between October 4th and 5th razed all 600m2 of the building and our preparation laboratory to the ground. Destroying 15% of the already prepared dinosaurbones! Fortunatly, none of our exquiste preserved skull fossils where destroyed!
We will never forget this nightmare, or the loss of some great fossils, But it hasn´t diminished our enthusiasm to carry on with the good work.The man who started the fire was arrested by police in February 2004.....
JANUARY 2004: the reconstruction of the new praparation lab and exhibitionhall is in progress! Rebuilding after four years of work means there´s much to be done. We´re still very enthusastic to carry on because we have 150 tons of rock containing bones, which are waiting to be prepared. And without doubt we´ll make some great new discoveries!
FEBRUARY 2004: our scientific paper about these new sauropod dinosaurs is nearly ready for publication!Hopefully we can submit the paper next month.
(JVP/Mateus/Laven/Knötsc hke)
An other paper about the histology of long bones of our sauropods by Dr. MARTIN SANDER
(University Bonn) is also in progress! And his work has some striking news about our little babys!! More later...
MICHAEL FASTNACHT has already submitted his paper for publication: he wrote about one of our pterosaurfossils ("Werner" the pterosaur). It was found articulated (3D!) a very nice fossil!
VOLKER KARL and a few other people wrote about the turtle remains from our dinosaur quarry and this paper is in review!
As you can see, we´re achieving results!
-THE DINOTEAM-
VOLUNTEERS IN THE PREPARATIONLAB:
Tanja Scheler,Ole Sumpf,Marco Mastrojani,Melanie Katt,Tino Laubrock,
Dennis Rössler, Tom Laven,Isabel Lay,Mario Schoppa
PRIVATE DINOHUNTERS:
Holger Lüdtke,Oliver Heumann,Udo Resch,Susanne Thiele,
Rolf Nimser,Werner Fricke
TEAMLEADER:
Octávio Mateus
GEAL Museu da Lourinhá Portugal
PREPARATORS: Dagmar Flemming
Andreas Hänel
Nils Knötschke
Werner Fink
GRAPHIC DESIGN:
Maria Lorsch
FOREIGN HELPERS:
Octávio Mateus(Portugal)
Ben Pabst (Preparator/CH)
Dave Unwin (Museum Berlin)
Michael Fastnacht (Uni Mainz)
Volker Karl (Uni Salzburg)
Martin Sander (Uni Bonn)
Trevor Dykes (Nürnberg)
Hartmut Haubold (Uni Halle)
Mario Schoppa (Uni Halle)
Marcel Opitz (Gladbeck)
CONTACT:
Dinosaurier Freilichtmuseum Münchehagen
Alte Zollstraße 5
D-31547 Rehburg Loccum/Germany
Tel.:049 /05037/2073 Fax.:049/05037/5739
E-MAIL: palaeo_nils@hotmail.com & omateus@dinocasts.com
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