Find in Messel Pit most likely prehistoric horse
The fossil of a mammal discovered in the Messel Pit this summer is most likely another prehistoric horse. "The preparation is not yet complete," excavation manager Torsten Wappler from the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt told the German Press Agency. It is a relatively small animal. "It was a young animal, in any case." The fossil was discovered in the Unesco World Heritage Site in the summer and was described by Wappler as a "spectacular find".
What was spectacular about the find was the stomach contents. "We found four teeth in the stomach, possibly the animal's milk teeth," said Wappler. This had never happened before in Messel. The teeth look like those of a prehistoric horse. It also happens today that ungulates swallow teeth. "The prehistoric horses were actually herbivores." According to Wappler, around 60 completely preserved prehistoric horses have been discovered in the oil shale in Messel so far.
Prehistoric horses are an extinct branch of the horse family. They lived in Central Europe around 50 million years ago and were not much larger than dachshunds. The Messel Pit in southern Hesse, with its significant fossil finds, was designated the first UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site in Germany in 1995. The finds bear witness to a world long after the extinction of the dinosaurs and long before evolutionary history produced Neanderthals or modern humans. The largest collection of Messel fossils is held by the Landesmuseum.
Source: www.dpa.com
