Lagerstatten

Lagerstatten is a German word referring to the "mother lode": the vein of gold or silver that makes its finder rich. Applied to paleontology, it is a rock formation with wonderful preservation. Your first-choice Web site for lagerstatten is here at the University of Bristol. Below are other links to

The Solnhofen Limestone (Late Jurassic).
The Fossils of Liaoning province, China (Early Cretaceous).
The Fossils of Messel (Eocene)
The Mazon Creek Formation
The Green River Formation
The La Brea Tar Pits
Amber
Dinosaur Soft Tissue Preserved
Bacteria in Salt Formations?
Lagerstätten Trivia (you have been warned!)

The Solnhofen Limestone

Home of Archaeopteryx and many beautiful pterosaur fossils.

The Fossils of Liaoning Province, China

Feature on the fossil deposits of Liaoning, China, from BBC News OnLine.
Confuciusornis, an Early Cretaceous bird from China. (It has DISPLAY feathers!)
Feathered dinosaurs from Natural History, 2001.
Confuciusornis
A pterosaur embryo inside a pterosaur egg. The paper was in the June 10 2004 Nature (no free Web access). Geotimes, August 2004.
Salamanders: and beautifully preserved. National Geographic News. The paper is Gao, K-Q, and N. H. Shubin. 2003. Earliest known crown-group salamanders. Nature 422, 424-428.
Oldest marsupial, reported 2003.
Oldest relative of placental mammals. Reported 2002.

The Fossils of Messel

What killed the Messel creatures? (Maybe a toxic plankton bloom in the lake.) Paper from late 2004.
Messel page at the Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt
A fossil of a pregnant early horse from the Eocene of Messel. BBC News OnLine, November 14, 2001. (In case you missed it on the Senckenberg site!)

The Mazon Creek Formation

Short article from Fossil News, 2000.

The Green River Formation

Short article from Fossil News, 2000.

The La Brea Tar Pits

Actually, this is redundant, because La Brea means "tar".

Feature article in Natural History magazine, June 2007
L.A.'s first tourist trap: a really nice feature article by Sid Perkins on the La Brea tar pits. Science News, January 24, 2004.
UC Berkeley page about the La Brea fauna. Californian life before human arrival.
How the La Brea animals were trapped
The Page Museum at La Brea, Los Angeles.
The sabertooth cats of La Brea. Discover magazine, 1993

Amber

Amber, "Nature's transparent tomb" , from a neat Web site, Wayne's Word at Palomar College.
Special exhibit of amber at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Images of Insects in Amber
World of Amber
Fossil spider silk. Dr. Zschokke was kind enough to allow me to use his photo. The paper is Zschokke, S. 2003. Spider-web silk from the Early Cretaceous. Nature 424: 636-637.
A spider in Miocene amber, with blood inside it.National Geographic News, October 4, 2005.
In 1995 Raul Cano claimed that he had revived bacteria from rocks tens of millions of years old. Information and pictures
Having figured out how to do this (at taxpayers' expense), Cano founded a company called Ambergene and promptly patented the method for extracting fossil bacteria and DNA. see this item.

Dinosaur Soft Tissue Preserved.

Mary Schweitzer and her discovery of soft tissue preserved in dinosaur bones. Discover magazine, April 2006.

Bacteria in Salt Formations?

Here is a claim of bacteria recovered alive from Permian salt beds, 250 million years old!

From Science News, June 1999 .
The "Permian bacteria" are probably modern. BBC News OnLine, June 7, 2001. Remember, extraordinary claims require extraordinary scrutiny. Remember too that the NASA bandwagon passengers would love to have really ancient bacteria to bolster their claims for Martian bacteria.
HOWEVER, here is a 2005 story in American Scientist which documents that Vreeland is still actively working on proving his claim. I still don't believe it (yet!).

Lagerstätten Trivia

Fossil feathers found inside fossil louse. BBC News OnLine, March 4, 2004. It's therefore a pretty good bet that the louse was living on a bird (of Eocene age, in this case).
Penis envy among palaoentologists.
In October 2003, with great fanfare, the discovery was announced of the oldest fossilized penis. National Geographic News, October 6, 2003. No, it's not a relic of Brian Boru. It's still attached to a fossil harvestman: a type of spider, from the 400-million year old Devonian-age Rhynie Chert of Scotland (see Chapter 8). I have a vague memory that the ostracods of the Cambrian Orsten deposits in Scandinavia have soft parts preserved in phosphate, including sex organs: but I have to go back and check that. The paper was in Nature, so is not generally available on the Web.
HOWEVER, the stakes have now been raised? lowered? by a new paper, this time in Science. This records the presence of a smaller, older penis in a Silurian ostracod. BBC News OnLine, December 5, 2003.

Return to Chapter 2 page

Last updated June 18, 2007.

Links checked October 17, 2006.