Erster Nachweis von Flugsaurierspuren in Ostwestfalen-Lippe (Kreis Minden-Lübbecke)

The Viennese Mountains. The striking mountain range stretches in the northwest of North Rhine-Westphalia. Its rock layers, tilted northwards, are an important window into the time of the dinosaurs. A relatively easily accessible place is the quarry Störmer near Wallöke. Employees of the LWL Museum for Natural Sciences have been regularly looking for new fossils here for decades. What they find there is then further investigated at the LWL Museum for Natural Sciences in Münster. In the quarry Störmer near Wallöke, we find deposits that were formed in the sea. At the time of the dinosaurs, in the Middle Ages, in the Jura, deposits were formed in the sea. And because the sea level has changed over time, this area has also partially dried up. So we don't just find sea deposits here, but also deposits that were formed on the beach and in mudflats. And in these areas, animals have also moved and left their traces there. For this, the quarry Störmer is well known for the fact that footprints of dinosaurs, large long-tailed eagles and predators have been found there again and again for years. What is new now is that contemporaries of the dinosaurs have also left traces there, namely flying saucers, which have moved from time to time on these mudflats and left their footprints there. This is the piece that was discovered and preserved as part of an excursion in the quarry Wallöke in 2019. And what we see on this piece is very prominent. The imprint of a flying saucer is very nicely embossed. It was a sensation, as flying saucer imprints from Westphalia were previously completely unknown. Dennis Thehder, a student employee at the LWL Natural History Museum, was also not at ease when he saw the newly discovered traces in the quarry Wallöke. When I heard in 2019 that traces of flying saucers had appeared, I was very enthusiastic because I really wanted to work with these animals. We therefore set up a small further expedition, two more students and me. In the end, it went very, very successfully. We looked at old quarries that have been abandoned for a long time, but also mainly the quarry where the first piece was found. We were able to make many more discoveries. The traces go from 10 cm in size down to only 2 cm, which is really significant. You have to imagine that you look at the layers on the side in the quarry. You have a very steep wall and you are dependent on the fact that pieces of rock break out of this wall. What we do is that we systematically look at places where we see that a lot has broken out of the wall. In principle, you have to look at every single stone separately. This is preferred, for example, in the late afternoon, when the light falls relatively low into the quarry, so that you have such a striped light that the traces cast a shadow. In the end, you have the best chance of actually seeing them. It is a view of a world millions of years ago. The researchers can create reconstructions based on the stoned foot and hand prints and also draw conclusions about the movement of the flying saurians. The flying saurians walked on all fours on the ground. This distinguishes them very essentially from, for example, birds. Birds walk on two legs, flying saurians on four. Similar to what bats do today. And then they put their hands on, leaving prints of three fingers. And the feet usually leave four to five prints. Sometimes the footprints have a very small fifth toe. But the hands were not set up like ours. Not pointing straight ahead, but the hands were rotated. They were turned outwards. Which, among other things, results in relatively strange hand prints, which are not always easy to recognize in the terrain. The animals were also passers-by. They moved like giraffes, mostly. In other words, they swung one side forward, then the other side. And that can be compared with a few other animals that you know. Now we have the problem that these tracks not only look strange, but are also flat. And these are all factors that make the representation of these tracks difficult for literature, for example. And then there is the method of photogrammetry, by which you can create 3D models of these pieces. And these 3D models can then be processed again, so that, for example, you can only represent the tracks with one color. So that the brain concentrates only on the shape of the tracks, but not on the color of the rock. Although the discovery of the Fluxauria tracks in the Viennese Mountains was a small sensation, it was more of a confirmation than a surprise for the researchers. Before the findings from the Steinbruch Störmer, we assumed that Fluxauria lived here with us, in the times of the dinosaurs. With these new finds, we now have the certainty that they were actually here. Even if they did not leave any bones or teeth, we found these prints in the sediment, footprints, handprints, which show us that these Fluxauria lived in the wetlands, probably looking for food there. The fact that these finds have now appeared, or after intensive research, also gives us hope that if we continue to search, we will be able to make further discoveries in the coming years. So that maybe longer Fluxauria horses can be found, if you look for them with the right means and the trained eye.