Speaker: Kamil Bernacki
Cloche d’Or district is the area of intense urban developments in recent years. The construction, landscaping and irrigation works are systematically exposing new fossiliferous outcrops.
My personal experience is one of an amateur fossil hunter. Before I started the Gasperich site exploration, my understanding of palaeontology was mostly theoretical and the one of geology very elementary. The process of discovering the Gasperich site allowed opening a small window into the new world.
My first finds in Cloche d’Or area date to late 2020, time of Covid-19 restrictions. With time, I collected over 4000 mostly fragmentary remains of Late Sinemurian and Early Pliensbachian invertebrates, simultaneously getting in contact with the Natural History Museum (A. Di Cencio, B. Thuy, R. Weis). The first joint visit on site resulted in discovery of fragmented ribs of an ichthyosaur. Further regular supervision and organised excavation added more material, including a vertebra, jawbone fragments and finally the section of snout with teeth.
Those finds attracted more attention to the site. Dedicated paper will be published soon (V. Fischer et al.) and works on other finds are ongoing – including the Gasperich ammonite stratigraphy project which I have pleasure to coordinate (with Ch. Meister, A. Di Cencio, V. Rebizant et al.). The extended collaboration resulted also in exchange of experiences and implication of other fossil hunters, including Valéry Rebizant, who collected high quality specimens from Gasperich already in 2015, and Anjin Thill, whose specimens served to establish the first stratigraphic conclusions.
Until now, we identified a series of horizons from the Obtusum zone (Obtusum and Stellare sub-zones) and the Ibex zone (Valdani and Luridum sub-zones). This supports hypothesis that the ichthyosaur layer belongs to Valdani sub-zone, directly below Acanthopleuroceras alisiense horizon.
collaborator paleontology, meeting of collaborators 2022 |
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