As of: March 14, 2024, 5:31 p.m
By: Johannes Welte
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The model of an Arizonasaurus in the Museum at Löwentor in Stuttgart and the foot detail of the track from Richelbach.
© Hennig, Ghedoghedo/Wikipedia
A farmer in Franconia unearthed extremely well-preserved footprints of a dinosaur.
However, the sensational find slumbered in a barn for 20 years.
Richelbach - A scientific sensation was unearthed during construction work for a pigsty on the Lower Main near Miltenberg: They are the well-preserved traces of an Arizonasaurus, which immortalized itself in the red sandstone 247 million years ago.
240 million years ago, the Odenwald was where the Sahara is today
When a lizard three meters long and weighing around 100 kilos crawled through the area of today's Odenwald in the Triassic period, it was hot and dry there.
At that time, Europe was roughly where the Sahara is today, but was then moved over 2,000 kilometers north by continental drift.
From time to time, rain caused flooding on the rivers.
Franz Hennig and Thomas Rosenberger present the sensational find.
© Roland Schönmüller
Here a lizard with a conspicuous dorsal sail was walking in the sand, perhaps hunting for small reptiles that the four-legged friend ate.
The trail was buried by a flood and remained hidden for 247 million years, until 20 years ago when a farmer built a pigsty in the 570-person village of Richelbach in Lower Franconia, Bavaria, 500 meters from the border with Baden-Württemberg.
The rare stone should actually disappear back into the ground
“During the excavation, several sandstones were dredged up,” reports village chronicler Franz Hennig (63), who is also the farmer’s brother.
The Richelbach physiotherapist Thomas Rosenberger got the stones to fortify the edge of a stream.
“He noticed the tracks and stored the 200 kilo stone in his shed,” Hennig continues.
When the now 65-year-old village chronicler wanted to write a chronicle to mark the town's 875th anniversary last year, he asked Rosenberger, now retired, for information.
He showed him the one meter by 30 centimeter stone - and that's when the sensation started.
The entire track plate of the Arizona dinosaur.
© Roman Museum Obernburg am Main.
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“We removed the dust and saw that you could see every single scale on the feet,” reports Hennig.
Prof. Alexander Nützel from the Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology in Munich identified the track: “These are without question the footprints of a four-legged vertebrate.
The preservation is very good.”
Renowned museums are scrambling for the rare fossil
The State Collection would like to exhibit the trace, as would the renowned Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt.
For now, the sensational find will be exhibited in a special exhibition in the Roman Museum in Obernberg am Main, near the site where it was found.
“We actually dedicate ourselves to the finds that the former Limes keeps giving us,” says museum director Eric Erfurth.
“A section with fossils would be very nice.” After all, other dinosaur tracks have already been discovered in the area.
Hennig also thinks: “Our dinosaur should stay in the area where it was found.” The Arizonasaurus got its name after the skeleton of its species was found in the state of the same name in 1947.
In France, a man recently discovered fossilized dinosaur bones while walking his dog.
Last year, scientists in Great Britain described a new species of spiny dinosaur.
However, a petrified reptile discovered in the Alps turned out to be a fake.