A wooded, roughly pyramid-shaped mountain of 1,097 metres above Lake Lugano on the Swiss and Italian border, holding one of the best records of marine life from the Middle Triassic anywhere. Its fossils were first noted in 1847. Oil shale on the mountain drew miners looking for lamp and furnace oil for Milan in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and from 1908 a plant at Spinirolo turned the bituminous shale into saurol, a skin ointment, until the business went bankrupt in 1960. The shale digging brought the fossils to the attention of Bernhard Peyer of the University of Zurich, whose systematic excavations from 1924 to 1938 found many new species. The Milan natural history museum’s collection from the mountain was destroyed by bombing in 1943, but the University of Zurich’s palaeontological institute and museum now holds more than 15,000 specimens. The Swiss side has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003, and the Italian side was added in 2010.
Middle Triassic marine life · Middle Triassic
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Switzerland
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