Korbach column
The Korbach Column is a 20 meter deep and up to 4 meter wide filled column in the limestone of a former quarry on the southern edge of the northern Hessian district town of Korbach . It is considered an important fossil deposit and is a ground monument due to the Hessian Monument Protection Act and thus protected as a cultural monument.
The fissure continues underground to the southwest and east of the quarry and has a total length of approximately one kilometer. The material with which the crevice is filled contains numerous fossils of terrestrial vertebrates (Tetrapoda) from the Upper Permian period about 255 million years ago. The rocks in which the crevice is located and the material of the crevice filling belong to the deeper (geologically older) part of the Zechstein series.
The crevice was discovered in 1964. After the first fossil discoveries, the American National Geographic Society financed systematic excavations at the exit point of the crevice in the abandoned quarry. The discovery of a lower jaw of the Cynodontier (representative of a group of “mammal-like reptiles”) Procynosuchus , previously only known from the Karoo deposits of southern Africa , led to a publication in the science magazine Nature . This animal became widely known as the "Korbach Dachshund". The city of Korbach then bought the site, covered it and built a platform for visitors. Other identifiable vertebrate fossils come from protorosaurs , captorhinids , pareiasaurs, and dicynodonts . Some finds are exhibited in the Wolfgang Bonhage Museum Korbach , another part of the finds is in the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe .
literature
- Sven Bökenschmidt: The Korbach Fissure fossil deposit - its origin and classification in the Zechstein of North Hesse. Dissertation, Marburg 2006 ( online ).
- Sven Bökenschmidt: The Korbach Column - Origin and History of a Fossil Deposit . In: History sheets for Waldeck 91 . Bad Arolsen; 2003, pp. 30-42. ISSN 0342-0965
- Heiner Heggemann, Thomas Keller: The Korbach Column - A unique site of land-living dinosaurs from the late ages in the Waldeck-Frankenberg district . In: Paleontological Monuments in Hesse 15 . Wiesbaden; 2003. ISBN 3-89822-315-9 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Hans-Dieter Sues & Jürgen A. Boy: A procynosuchid cynodont from central Europe . In: Nature . 331, 1988, pp. 523-524. doi : 10.1038 / 331523a0 .
- ↑ With the Korbach Dachshund on the long way to the Unesco World Heritage Site , Hessische / Niedersächsische Allgemeine Zeitung September 25, 2014.
- Jump up ↑ Hans-Dieter Sues & Wolfgang Munk: A remarkable assemblage of terrestrial tetrapods from the Zechstein (Upper Permian: Tatarian) near Korbach (northwestern Hesse) . In: Paleontological Journal . 70, No. 1-2, 1996, pp. 213-223. doi : 10.1007 / BF02988279 .
Web links
- The Korbach Column on the official homepage of the city of Korbach
- The Korbach Column fossil site near Korbach on the homepage of the Hessian State Office for Nature Conservation, Environment and Geology (HLNUG)
- Korbach fissure. Datasheet of the Korbacher column in the Paleobiology Database
Coordinates: 51 ° 15 ′ 43 " N , 8 ° 52 ′ 50" E