‘Giant’ secrets from the past

Gross Pampau / DPA

Amateur palaeontologist Wolfgang Hoepfner painstakingly removed all the dirt surrounding some fossilized bones, gradually revealing the skeleton of a 6-metre baleen whale, 11 million years after it had died in the North Sea.
“For a palaeontologist like me, it was almost like winning the lottery,” he later explained with pride. Fossil hunting is a hobby that demands patience. Hoepfner, 67, found the whale in a German gravel pit which he and his twin brother Gerhard and other amateurs have been investigating since 1984.
The whale was the group’s second significant find this year. In the summer the team found parts of an ancient seal. “A find of this kind is unheard of in Central Europe,” vertebrate palaeontologist Oliver Hampe of Berlin’s Natural History museum says of the whale. “What is sensational about this find is that we have an almost complete skeleton.”
Hampe says finding the whale’s pelvis was what made the case so rare. “In a whale, the pelvis is isolated in the animal’s tissue and often drifts away during the decomposition process.” That usually leaves just a skull, spine and so on.
Over the past 30 years the amateurs have found a series of fossils, including 11 whale and shark skeletons at their favourite pit, located in Gross Pampau east of Hamburg. Eleven million years ago, a larger North Sea — the Paratethys to give it its palaeogeographical name — covered large tracts of northern Germany.
“Here you can look right into the depths of the original North Sea,” says Hoepfner of “his” pit, which actually belongs to a quarry company. The twin brothers remember the day they made their find. “First there was just part of the tail protruding from the clay,” Wolfgang recalls.
A week later the first tail bones had been exposed. “And the day was not yet over when we found the skull.” This particular gravel pit is of special interest, because a geological peculiarity means that the ancient seafloor is just a few metres below the land surface and not 150 metres down as elsewhere.
“There is nothing like this anywhere else in north-western Europe,” says Hampe, who is providing the scientific advice to the amateurs actually doing the digging. The reason: A salt dome underlies the clay layer where the palaeontologists are making their finds.
“The salt is slowing pushing the substrate up,” Hampe says. The commercial removal of the gravel is in turn exposing the ancient seafloor from above. And there is no end in sight, for as long as the gravel mining continues. “We expect to find quite a bit more in Gross Pampau,” Hampe says.