Dinosaurier-Park Altmuehltal at Denkendorf

The final day brought us back to Archaeopteryx, Nos 8 and 12 to be exact, which are on display at the dinosaur park.

A castle in the Altmuehltal

Wind turbines at the Dinosaur Park

I was a little wary of this at first, I knew pre-teens who had been there recently (and loved it) so wondered if it was going to be too much aimed at school age children. I need not have worried though - I thoroughly enjoyed it!
We went first to the main Museum Hall, dominated by a huge pterosaur fossil

Crowding round to see Archeopteryx albersdoerferi, the oldest specimen, known as "The Phantom". This was bought by Raimund Albersdorf in 2009, after being found in the 1990s, and John Nudds and Cindy Howells described it as a new species

A. albersdoerferi (No 8) - a skull, shoulder and left wing

John Nudds, who led this trip, with No 8 which he and Cindy Howells described

Once again there are some great specimens in this museum too

A cuttlefish with ink sac

Echinoid

Jellyfish

The ammonite shaped Archaeopteryx Pavilion, built of local stone, houses Specimen No 12

The Archaeopteryx Pavilion is shaped like an ammonite in plan view

Archaeopteryx No12

This, the oldest Archaeopteryx, was found in 2010 and was initially thought too fragile to survive preparation but skilled preparators managed it!

There's an excellent display with plenty of detail

The actual fossil - lighting and reflections make it hard to photograph

After a coffee we headed to the Forest Trail as we were due to meet up with the rest of the group to have lunch at the "Beergarden in the Forest". The trail is laid out through a shady, wooded area which gives it a nice "primeval" atmosphere (think "Lost World" or "Jurassic Park") and there ar areas devoted to the Palaeozoic Era, the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods of the Mesozoic, and to the Cenozoic Era.

There are life sized models of typical animals of the Era, and in this section there are displays of fossilisation and discovery

A "Wide mouthed Frog" (reminds me of a joke) in the Palaeozoic area

Demonstrating how animals become fossils

How fossils can be found and excavated

Life size models are pretty amazing! 

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Though they aren't all enormous!

A final quarry at Schamhaupten, where we could see some professional excavation going on, as well as having a last look round for ourselves

The excavation site

We finished off the trip with a "last night meal" at the Trompete in Eichstatt. 

Nördlingen and the Ries crater

The Ries impact crater lies to the west of Eichstätt, where we were staying and we drove via a quarry at Aumuhle to Nordlingen where we visited the Rieskrater Museum and had some free time, before returning via another quarry at Otting. The two quarries enabled us to see exposures of impact rocks, ejecta breccia, and field relationships whilst the Museum has a superb display including meteorite and Moon rock samples, and St Georgskirche in the town centre is built of suevite, the diamondiferous rock produced by the impact.

Aumuhle quarry (Steinbruch Aumuhle) 

Aumuhle quarry. There are particularly interesting exposures on the right hand side as you enter

This quarry lies about one km north of the village of Hainsfarth and is easily accessible via a level track. The impact crater was first recognised as such, rather than a volcanic formation, in the 1960s by Eugene Shoemaker. An information board by the entrance explains how a 1.5 km diameter meteorite, travelling at some 70,000 km/h impacted in this area during the Tertiary Period, creating a 5 km deep crater, 24 km across. Kilometers of underlying rock were reduced to rubble - the Bunte Breccia.

The information board

There are three rock types exposed here:
"Buntetrummernmasse" (Bunte breccia) is a disordered reddish material deposited rapidly on the underlying Triassic/Palaeogene rocks and crystalline basement. It is composed of sedimentary fragments of Keuper sandstone and marl
Polymict crystalline breccia
Both of these are low pressure rocks, there is no evidence of shock mineralisation.
Suevite on the other hand is a high pressure, coesite and stishovite (after Q) bearing rock. It contains glassy fragments, the result of basement gneiss melted at around 600 ⁰C by the impact and then ejected as a plume into the atmosphere. The suevite may have settled on top of the breccias as it fell back to earth, or it may have flowed outwards. The similarities between this and a plinian style eruption are striking and it isn't surprising that for many years the crater was thought to be volcanic in origin.
There are a number of places in the quarry where the contact between the suevite and underlying breccia is exposed.

John Nudds explaining the exposure: Bunte breccia below and suevite over

Crystalline breccia

Rock cores... sadly not infilled afterwards 

The contact between Bunte Breccia (left0 and Suevite (right). Trying to convince myself that there is a baked rind on the Bunte breccia as a result of hot suevite impacting

We had time to explore the quarry ourselves before continuing to Nordlingen where we were able to park just outside the town walls and walk to the museum.

 Lots of traditional buildings in the historic centre of Nordlingen

The museum. Enormous pitched roofs - two stories in the roofspace!
Inside, there was a lovely relief model of the crater which shows the extent well. We had noticed as we drove to Nordlingen that we were in a flat area, but completely surrounded by low hills

Relief model of the Ries crater with the town of Nordlingen in red

An aerial photo shows how the crater rim is picked out by wooded areas and clouds

The geological map of the area showing the inner, crystalline ring, where basement rocks were raised up,
and the outer, crater rim.

https://www.geopark-ries.de/en/entstehung-rieskrater/ the Geopark webpages have lots of useful information about the crater formation, discovery and geology.
As well as Ries crater specific displays there were some beautiful meteorite specimens.

A stony iron meteorite from Chile with olivine crystals and widdmanstatten patterning

Iron meteorite, Cape York, Greenland

From the museum we wandered on into the town centre in search of lunch and found several restaurants in the square around St Georgskirche, so that we had a good view of this suevite church while we ate!

St Georgskirche

St Georgskirche

We were able to have a look around inside the church, accompanied by organ music. The interior is a delight in pale cream and grey with local stone slab flooring.

Limestone flooring

From Nordlingen we drove (separately because of various road closures!) towards Otting, finally meeting up again by the Gemeinde where we found a beautiful boulder of suevite - a super opportunity to examine its fresh surface for some of the interesting clasts to be found.

The meteorite excavated a kms deep crater, reducing crystalline basement material to rubble before ejecting it. This then fell back to Earth, mantling the landscape, and becoming lithified as suevite.
Very like a welded ignimbrite! Easy to see why the volcanic interpretation arose.

A clast with a glassy rim where molten material aggregated around it

Another clast with a glassy rim but crystalline basement material in the centre

A vesicular, melted clast with plastic deformation

A vesicular clast, volatiles were liberated from the rock during melting

A clast of unmolten coarse grained crystalline material and molten, then recrystallised, fine grained darker areas

A clast half gneiss, and half vesicular fine-grained mafic.

A clast with a vesicular mafic exterior and an unmolten crystalline gneiss core

Spindle shaped clast with vesicles and a fine grained, paler core

An particularly pale coloured clast, and no apparent glass around the rim

Plastic deformation of a vesicular mafic clast

Plastic deformation of mafic clast, with paler areas

Plastic deformation of vesicular mafic material and paler area

The gneissose areas in the clasts reminded me of deep basement material that I'd seen in a volcanic neck in Spain, Cerro Hoyazo, where gneissic clasts had been incorporated at depth, though they aren't melted there. It is easy to see how it was initially thought to be volcanic.
There's more about the impactites and the clasts in them here: http://www.impact-structures.com/impact-germany/the-ries-impact-structure-germany/the-ries-impactites/

Otting quarry - historical site

Our last stop of the day was nearby at a small quarry just outside Otting, famous for being where Eugene Shoemaker first identified the impact crater as such.

Otting quarry, now disused and somewhat overgrown

Ted having a look around in the corner!

A close up. Apparently there are some sedimentary clasts in the suevite here but I didn't see any

Shoemaker and Chao identified coesite in samples from this quarry in 1960, a high pressure polymorph of quartz, which, in unmetamorphosed rocks, would only be found at impact sites.
The quarry is just outside the crater rim, showing that the ejecta behaved as a fluidised flow, forming this example of a rampart crater. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%B6rdlinger_Ries