**The Schienerberg landscape 13 million years ago. Detail from a monumental painting by Zurich-based landscape and architectural artist Adolf Rudolf Holzhalb, Zurich, 1871.** © focusTerra – ETH Zürich

A witness to the Deluge

The fossilised skeleton of a giant salamander found in the stone quarries at Öhningen is one of the most famous fossil finds in history. Zurich-born Johann Jakob Scheuchzer believed it to be the remains of a human who had drowned in the biblical Flood.

Felix Graf

Felix Graf was a curator at the National Museum Zurich until 2017. Now he works as a freelance publicist.

The stone quarries at Öhningen on the northern shore of Lower Lake Constance close to the Swiss border have been world famous since the early 18th century. Hundreds of species of flora and fauna were described for the first time on the basis of fossils found there. Buried in fine-clayey lime sludge, the plants and animals, especially the leaves of the trees that grew along the shore, the dragonflies and fish, were extremely well preserved. The fossilised skeleton of a giant salamander is probably the most spectacular find. In 1725 it became part of the collection of Zurich-born physician and naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, a baroque-era polymath who first translated the Latin word physica into German as Naturwüssenschaft, i.e. natural science, and wrote the first book on the subject in the German language.

**Portrait of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer. Print, circa 1731.** e-rara

A prominent figure in early Enlightenment Zurich, Scheuchzer had already obtained fossils from Öhningen prior to 1725 through middle men such as physician Hans Kaspar Blass and pastor Hans Ulrich Holzhalb, both from Stein am Rhein, less than five kilometres further along the lake from the quarries. He published works on the fossils entitled Piscium querelae et vindiciae ('The grievances and claims of the fishes') and Herbarium diluvianum (a catalogue of plants rendered extinct by the flood). Much of Scheuchzer's Museum Diluvianum, a palaeontological collection comprising some 2,500 fossils, is still in existence today. The artefacts now held by the Department of Palaeontology at the University of Zurich include the famous antediluvian pike (Lucius antediluvianus), which speaks for the fish in the previously mentioned educational pamphlet, written in the style of a humanist didactic dialogue, in which the pike explains that the fossil fish are not whimsical 'plays of nature', as previously assumed, but living creatures killed in the Flood.

A pioneer of palaeontology

Scheuchzer was streets ahead of the majority of his contemporaries in deciphering the fossils as the vestiges of real plants and animals. His interpretation of the fossilised giant salamander as the remains of a human being who had perished in the biblical Flood garnered the most raised attention. He wrote a broadsheet pamphlet entitled HOMO DILUVII TESTIS. Bein-Gerüst / Eines in der Sündflut ertrunkenen Menschen, commonly translated as 'Man, a witness to the Deluge', in which he described the depicted fossil in minute detail. He cited the year of publication not as 1726 but as '4032 after the Great Flood'. Five years later, he republished this remarkable article in the first volume of his Physica sacra, a work replete with full-page illustrations. Also known as the Kupfer-Bibel, or 'Copper Bible', its 759 copperplates made it one of the most richly illustrated works of the 18th century. In this four-volume opus, Scheuchzer attempted to reconcile the biblical creation narrative with the understanding of natural science prevalent during the Enlightenment period. By no means an easy undertaking. But it earned him a reputation as one of the foremost pioneers of modern palaeontology. Interestingly, the giant salamander given the zoological name Andrias scheuchzeri to commemorate Scheuchzer's trailblazing role still exists today: in China and Japan. The fossilised specimen from Scheuchzer's collection can now be seen in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem in the Netherlands.

Scheuchzer's broadsheet pamphlet HOMO DILUVII TESTIS introduces readers to the fossil of a human being drowned in the biblical Flood. — **Scheuchzer's broadsheet pamphlet «HOMO DILUVII TESTIS» introduces readers to the fossil of a human being drowned in the biblical Flood.** e-rara

**Specimen of a fossilised giant salamander from the Öhningen quarries in Teylers Museum in Haarlem (NL).** Wikimedia

It is tempting to imagine how the Schienerberg area on the northern shore of Lower Lake Constance must have looked 13 million years ago when, in addition to willow and poplar, beech and oak, plane, fig and laurel, palms also grew alongside cinnamon and camphor trees on the banks of a lake that has long since vanished. And how the cries of monkeys and the trumpeting of mastodons could be heard emanating from the subtropical riparian forest while the civet-like 'Öhningen fox' prowled the shores. An almost complete skeleton of this extinct beast has been preserved and now forms part of the British Museum's collection.

A monumental painting by Zurich-based landscape and architectural artist Rudolf Holzhalb (1835–1885) gives us some idea of how the lifeworld might have looked on the Schienerberg in the Miocene epoch. The oil painting created in 1871 under the direction of geologist Arnold Escher von der Linth and botanist Oswald Heer is now on public display at focusTerra, the Earth & Science Discovery Centre of the ETH in Zurich.

**'Oeningen in the Tertiary Period', oil painting by R. Holzhalb, 1870/71, on display at focusTerra, the Earth & Science Discovery Centre of ETH Zurich.** © focusTerra – ETH Zürich

The Öhningen quarries are situated in what is now the village of Wangen. They were named after Öhningen because the Augustinian canons from the local monastery were the first to draw attention to the fossils. Limestone-quarrying began here as early as 1500. The cloisters of the Öhningen monastery and the sacristy of the collegiate church were paved with slabs from the quarries. Owing to its high bitumen content, the fine-grained limestone from Öhningen was also known as 'stinkstone' or 'fetid limestone'. It has gone down in art history as the material used in the works of Hans Morinck, a stone and wood sculptor who was born in the Netherlands and became a citizen of Konstanz in 1582. His mid reliefs and high reliefs based on Dutch prints made him one of the most notable artists working in the Lake Constance region around 1600.

Hans Konrad Asper, the grandson of Zurich's 'Reformation painter' Hans Asper, who converted to Catholicism in Constance in 1613, also worked with Öhningen limestone. Perhaps the most famous example is the life-size figure of knight Johann Walter von Roll that graces his tomb in the chapel of Mammern Castle in the canton of Thurgau. The head and hands of this outstanding piece of sculpture are fashioned from Öhningen stinkstone, the body and sarcophagus from Rorschach sandstone. It is one of the very few stone sculptures in Switzerland that portrays a real-life person from the time.