History of the site

The Messel Pit was first worked commercially in the 1880s as a source of oil shale (Ölschiefer). Fossil finds were noted from the start, but systematic scientific collection began only in the 1970s. By that time, the quarry was exhausted and plans were made to convert the 60-metre-deep pit into a landfill — a project that would have entombed one of the greatest fossil deposits ever discovered. Scientists, led by palaeontologist Wilhelm Freudenberg and later the Senckenberg Institute, mounted a decades-long campaign against the landfill plan. The state of Hesse purchased the site in 1991, and UNESCO inscription followed in 1995.

The Middle Eocene, approximately 47 million years ago, was a world very different from today: tropical forests covered central Europe, and the mammal groups that would come to dominate the modern world — horses, bats, rodents, primates — were only a few million years old and still in early, experimental forms. The Messel lake preserved this snapshot with astonishing fidelity because its deep, oxygen-free bottom waters prevented decomposition and scavengers from destroying the organisms that sank to the floor.