Dinosaur finds in the Steirische Eisenwurzen Nature and Geopark – an overview

1.) Finds in Großreifling
In the former quarry of the Scheiblinggraben in Großreifling, Father Engelbert Prangner of Admont Abbey found the skull and parts of the vertebral column of a lizard measuring about 90 cm in 1843. They came from an approximately 9 m long marine lizard called Toretocnemus from the group of ichthyosaurs (“fish dinosaurs”). The animals had a narrow tail fin and four paddle-shaped fins. They could not swim very fast. Except for a few vertebral bones, the find was destroyed in a fire at Admont Abbey in 1863. Only the drawing of a forestry employee provided information about the find. Unfortunately, we do not know what happened to it later.

2.) Exciting finds in the GeoVillage 2019

90 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period, the Alps were still forming. Only islands rose from the sea. Plant parts converted to charcoal in the marine deposits of Gams have been known for many years. They show that forested islands were not far away. It could therefore be assumed that animals also lived on the islands, whose remains were washed into the sea together with the plants.

A team of Austrian and Hungarian geologists led by Attila Ösi (Eötvös University Budapest) collected 1000 kg of the soft, carbonaceous clay in Gams. This was washed through sieves and searched for the remains of vertebrates. In several working steps, the clay is broken down into its smallest components. This exposes the fossil remains of animals. The rest of the clay is washed away in sieves with water. What remains are hard components, among them the bones and teeth of creatures that lived 90 million years ago. The bone of a frog remained in the sieve, as well as teeth from crocodiles, lizards and from dinosaurs and the mosasaur that lived in the sea. Many teeth and bones also came from fish that lived in the sea around the island.

Most of the bones and teeth are no bigger than a few millimetres. They were washed far out to sea along with the plant remains. There they sank to the bottom of the sea. Today we can no longer determine exactly where the island was located.

Images: Reconstruction © Pecsiscs Tibor

3.) The disaster from space

65 million years ago, a meteorite about 10,000 m in size struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The shock waves created temperatures of over 10,000 degrees. This vaporised the celestial body and the rocks at the impact site. Other rock debris was thrown up as dust. The dust cloud enveloped the Earth for a long time and did not let any of the sun’s rays through.

This event marks the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods in Earth’s history. Long before the theory of the meteorite impact was developed, scientists discovered that the last dinosaurs had died out on the mainland at this turning point. Marine animals such as ammonites, hippurites, trochacateon and nerineans also did not survive this period.