Ancient German fossils on display at Lizzadro Museum

By Lizzadro Museum

The slate quarries of Bundenbach, a little town in southern Germany near the French border, yielded slate shingles used on roofs for more than 400 years. Quarrymen were the first to notice the rare pyritized fossils embedded in the slate. By the 1800s fossil collectors recognized the importance of the Bundenbach fossils. The fossils are Devonian sea creatures preserved by pyrite in slate.

Joseph F. Lizzadro, the founder of the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art, collected more than 80 specimens of these Devonian-age sea creatures during a trip to Bundenbach in the early 1960s. “Bundenbach’s Golden Fossils” are on display through Sunday, April 3, at the museum, 220 Cottage Hill Ave, Elmhurst.

Germany looked very different 400 million years ago. A shallow sea covered the area around present day Bundenbach. The waters were abundant with sea life, including starfish, trilobites and crinoids (sea lilies). At some point poisons swept through the sea, instantly wiping out all life. Mud quickly buried the bodies of these creatures and left them undisturbed in their life positions, such as swaying in the water or burrowing in the ground. The mud slowly hardened and formed shale.

At the same time organic matter of preserved organisms formed pyrite in a process called pyritization. Heat and pressure squeezed the shale in a process called metamorphism, which typically destroys fossils, but due to the presence of pyrite, the Bundenbach specimens remained intact.

The quarries of Bundenbach closed in the 1990s due to the expense of mining slate and the availability of cheaper man-made materials.