47 million years ago, the world was a hothouse.
Lush jungles covered much of the globe, stretching far from the equator, and they were rife with
mammals.
This was life in the Eocene Epoch.
And around a quiet lake in what's now Germany, a typical scene was unfolding in late spring.
Crocodiles patrolled the waters.
Bats and birds flew overhead.
Horses, many of them pregnant, came by for a drink.
And turtles were … having turtle sex.
But then, all of these animals died, and quickly, tumbling down to their final resting place
at the bottom of the lake.
Then it happened again.
And again, probably over thousands of years.
In time, the lake filled with corpses.
No one would discover this eerie scene until the 1800's, when miners began working in
exposed deposits of mud, near the town of Messel, Germany.
They were extracting oil from the rock.
And along with the oil, they found phenomenal fossils from those events 47 million years
ago.
The fossils were so beautifully preserved, it was as if the rocks had captured snapshots
of life in the Eocene.
The fossils contained early mammals with their hair still intact, birds with feathers, and
turtles that died right in the middle of mating, the first known vertebrates found to have
fossilized while doing the deed.
What a way to go.
But what happened to these Eocene animals?
And why were their remains so exquisitely preserved?
The answers lie at the bottom of Germany's lethal lake.
The fossil pit at Messel is one of the world's best examples of a Lagerstätte, an area of
especially amazing fossil preservation.
It may sound like some kind of beer, but Lagerstätte means "storage place", and in the lake
deposits of Messel, it's not just bones that were stored away.
Take the holotype of Darwinius, an early lemur-like primate.
Not only are all of its bones present in Messel, but the fossil also has a full body of hair
still intact, proving it was just as cute and fuzzy as you might have guessed.
Or look at the fossils of the early horse Eurohippus, some of which still have leaves
preserved in their guts.
Eight of the Eurohippus specimens found at Messel were pregnant, and their fetuses were
preserved as well.
Still other fossils reveal black outlines of animals' bodies impressed into the rock,
showing pudgy bellies, big ears, and sleek silhouettes in a way that bones alone never
could.
But it's not just the level of preservation that sets Messel apart.
Even more interesting are the types of animals preserved there.
Some of the earliest known bat fossils anywhere come from Messel, preserved as full skeletons
with the outlines of wings and ears.
These beautiful specimens have shown paleontologists that bats started looking like bats a very
long time ago – and that echolocation developed much earlier than we once thought.
And bats aren't the only flying animals that show up.
One of the most common animals found in Messel are birds, complete with feathers that have
melanosomes -- the cellular structures that contain pigment -- still intact.
So far, Messel has turned up 70 species of birds, and 8 species of bats, which is an
incredible abundance of these kinds of animals that tend not to fossilize very well.
But perhaps even stranger than the flying animals are the turtles.
Maybe it doesn't sound strange to find fossil turtles in a big lake deposit, but it's
pretty strange to find nine sets of them fossilized in the middle of mating.
So, what happened to the turtles and the horses?
How did so many birds and bats fall into a lake?
And how are all of these things preserved so perfectly, with so much of their bones,
feathers, and fur in place?
Well, one clue is that, in order for the turtles to have fossilized while mating, they must
have died really quickly.
And in order to preserve flying animals like birds and bats, the event would've had to
affect not just those in and around the lake, but also those that lived above it.
So, one possible explanation for all of this is that there was a big bloom of cyanobacteria.
We see this happen sometimes in lakes today.
Cyanobacteria can grow out of control in warm, nutrient-rich water, and release chemicals
so toxic that any animal that ingests them dies almost instantly.
Blooms of cyanobacteria are also seasonal, and there's some indication that many of
the fossilized animals at Messel died during late Spring or early Summer that's when modern
horses tend to be pregnant, and when modern turtles tend to mate.
And these kinds of bacterial blooms could have killed birds and bats, if they drank
the toxic water.
This explanation, proposed by German scientists in 2004, is a good one.
But there's still one big problem: those turtles.
After all, these were aquatic turtles.
They lived in this lake, and presumably ingested its water all the time.
Cyanobacteria would have killed them long before they had a chance to mate.
And even more troublesome, there's plenty of algae preserved in the lake, but there's
no fossil evidence of cyanobacteria.
So if it wasn't cyanobacteria, then what was it?
Well, that relates back to the lake itself, and why it was there in the first place.
Lake Messel formed in a steep-sided volcanic crater called a maar.
We know this because the base of the lake is full of the broken volcanic rock that typically
fills a crater after a major eruption.
So, the crater filled with water.
But that didn't mean the volcano was done erupting.
Some scientists think that what happened at Messel is similar to what happened at another
Maar, called Lake Nyos in Cameroon, West Africa in 1986 -- it was an eruption of carbon dioxide.
Volcanic gases can be instantly deadly, and eruptions of carbon dioxide are known in Swahili
as mazukus or evil winds – invisible clouds of gas that asphyxiate anything in their path.
A sudden release of CO2 would have choked out anything in the water, as well as anything
by the water, and anything above the water – from mating turtles, to pregnant horses,
to bats, all at the same time.
And Mazukus can happen in a couple of different ways.
For example, the magma chamber that made the crater of Lake Messel could have just released
a whole bunch of CO2 all at once, like a big, nasty volcanic burp.
And this can happen if magma comes in contact with carbon-rich rocks.
Or, Messel could have undergone what's known as a limnic eruption, where CO2 that was dissolved
in the lake water was suddenly released.
CO2 dissolves in water, which is normally not a problem.
But in deep, still-water lakes, dissolved gases can separate into layers, in a process
called stratification.
Heavy gases, like CO2, will sink to the bottom of the lake, while lighter gases, like oxygen,
will stay close to the top.
This is what most likely happened at Lake Nyos in 1986.
A thick layer of dissolved carbon dioxide built up at the bottom of the lake.
And then something shook up the layers of gas in the water, causing the CO2 to race
to the surface and eventually form a Mazuku.
The trigger could've been an underwater landslide, or an earthquake, or a large amount
of water entering the lake at once, like during a big flood.
We're still not totally sure what caused Lake Nyos to erupt, and we definitely don't
know what triggered the lake at Messel.
But because the fossils of Messel were preserved over long periods of time, it seems likely
that Mazukus struck there more than once.
After each release of carbon dioxide, the animals in and around the lake died.
Then the gas slowly built up again in the water, until something disturbed it, and the
cycle of death happened all over again.
But Mazukus would have only killed the animals of Messel.
They didn't preserve them.
The reason the animals were so well preserved was because of the chemistry of the lake itself.
Once the animals died, they sunk into the still, cold, CO2-rich waters at the bottom
of the lake.
With so much CO2 and so little oxygen, the lake bottom wasn't habitable, which kept
scavengers from disturbing the corpses.
That's why so many fossils are preserved as articulated skeletons.
But anaerobic bacteria could thrive in this environment, and they got to work.
Harder tissues like hair, feathers, and bones were more resistant to the bacteria, but the
bacteria could eat away at the soft tissues, like skin, muscles, and organs.
Then, the chemical byproducts of this decay reacted with dissolved iron in the oxygen-poor
waters to create a mineral called siderite.
This mineral slowly settled onto the bacteria and preserved them in place, leaving a layer
of siderite around the organs and soft tissues.
Then, this layer became filled with oily organic material, and over time, it created dark shadowy
haloes around fleshy tissues like skin and organs.
Finally, all of this material fossilized into the rocks that those miners found, millions
of years later.
Small particles of mud and clay drifted down to cover the remains.
As the layers built up, their weight compressed the fossils and dirt into thin layers called
varves.
Some layers built up at only a hundredth of a millimeter a year, an entire year of sediment
crammed into a layer that's thinner than a page of your favorite novel.
And there are a lot of varves in Messel.
In fact, there's a varve for each of the approximately 1 million to 1 and a half million
years of deposition that occurred there about 47 million years ago.
These thin pages of oily muck captured not just the death of the animals, but also how
they lived, what they ate, and – quite literally- who they loved.
So it was the truly remarkable combination of all of these steps – rapid death, followed
by bacterial decay, then siderite, and oil, and the formation of varves – that preserved
the beautiful fossils found in the Messel Pit.
And that's also why Lagerstätten are so rare.
They're the sum of dozens of just-right conditions, which don't happen every day.
So when we do find a lagerstatte, we have to protect it.
And at first, the Messel pit was excavated for one specific type of fossil: the fossilized
algae that had long since turned into oil, permeating the spaces between grains of mud,
to form oil shale.
But when mining stopped in the 1970's, the German government considered turning the pit
into a garbage dump.
Thankfully, a group stepped in, to keep the complex and beautiful story of Messel -- which
began with that peaceful scene 47 million years ago -- from being lost forever, to time
and trash.
Thanks for joining me today, and thanks to all of our patrons who help make these videos
possible.
And we want to thank our first two eontologists, Duncan Miller and David Rasmussen.
Thank you so much for your support!
If you'd like to join them, head over to patreon.com/eons and pledge for some neat
and nerdy rewards.
And, if you're interested, like I am, in how things came to be, then I beseech you
to check out our new sister channel from PBS Digital Studios, America From Scratch, which
which explores all of the opportunities, both past and future, of the great experiment that is
America.
Now, what do you want to know about the history of life on Earth?
Let me know in the comments!
And if you haven't already, be sure to go to youtube.com/eons and subscribe!
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