THE MIDDLE JURASSIC FOSSILS OF ANWIL
For more than a century, we have known about the 165 million-year-old ammonites and fossil bivalves and gastropods at Anwil in the Jura mountains. These items are prized by collectors because of the yellow shells preserved within red sediment. A new excavation project has once again provided much material.
In a joint 2014 project of Archäologie und Museum Baselland, the Natural History Museum of Bern and the Natural History Museum Basel, we launched a dig of the fossil-rich layers in a field at Anwil, to around four metres' depth.
The excavation was done very carefully, and the result was huge amounts of fossil material, which will be prepared and assessed in the coming months and years. We are particularly keen to find out how long it took to deposit the layer of just 60 cm, and how its unique preservation originated.
