The Lebanese fossil fish

The limestone above the villages of Haqel, Hjoula and Nammoura in the Lebanese mountains holds one of the most important fossil deposits on Earth, and it has been quarried for it since the nineteenth century.

All three are Cenomanian, the earliest stage of the Late Cretaceous, so roughly a hundred to ninety four million years old. The rock is plattenkalk: fine-grained, laminated, organic-rich lithographic limestone laid down in warm shallow water on the continental shelf. That combination is what makes a Konservat-Lagerstatte. Nothing disturbed the carcasses and nothing rotted them fast, so what is preserved is not only bone.

Soft tissue is the whole point here. The Lebanese beds have produced key evidence on the evolution of cephalopods, crustaceans, hagfish, sharks, marine reptiles and pterosaurs, preserving structures that simply do not survive anywhere else. The fish assemblage is the most species-rich reported from anywhere in the Mesozoic. The three sites are not duplicates of each other either: Haqel and Hjoula share about half their species, while Nammoura shares only around twenty per cent with the other two, which means each quarry is sampling a different piece of the same sea.

Lebanese fish were reaching European cabinets in the 1800s and these are among the classic localities of palaeontology.

Practically, the quarries operate commercially with associated collections, and the usual arrangement is that you pay to visit and at some of them pay to split rock. That is the legitimate route.

Two cautions. Lebanese law governs the export of fossils, and somebody selling you a slab does not settle the question, so ask the operator what paperwork applies. And this market has a long-standing problem with restored and composite specimens: a fish that looks too perfect has usually been helped.

Haqel and Hjoula are about ninety minutes from Beirut, in the hills behind Byblos.