Discovery of the rodent from Valeč

At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries people no longer believed that the imprints in stones resembling plants and animals were mere random “pranks of nature” – they started to see them as real remains of ancient creatures. The imprints were thought to be proof of a biblical flood. The oldest documented find in Europe is the fossil of the so-called rodent from Valeč.

Valeč is situated in the region below the Doupov Mountains, which were volcanically active in around the middle of the Tertiary. Volcanic ash and slag covered the area below the mountains, where entire biotopes were preserved. Modern radiometric measurements date this event to 31-32 million years ago. Back then, there were also numerous bodies of water below the mountains, on the bottom of which calcareous sediments formed. These limestones were quarried during the Baroque reconstruction of Valeč chateau and it is likely that it was during the course of this work that the famous fossil was discovered in around 1690. It was first described in the work Memorabilia of Subterranean Saxony (Memorabilia Saxoniae Subterraneae, 1709) by the physician, natural scientist and collector Gottlieb F. Mylius. He called the fossil “water mouse” (Wassermaus) and was the first person on land to bear witness to the great flooding of the world. Until then, the only fossils to have been found were from an aquatic environment, and, according to the teachings of Aristotle, the scientific community at the time considered them to be pranks of nature, the product of the formative power of inanimate matter. The fossil from Valeč was overshadowed in the history of science by a find made by the Swiss physician Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, who discovered a fossil reminiscent of a person, more than a metre long, in in Tertiary lake sediments near Öhningen in 1725. However, this famous discovery of a “man - witness of the deluge” (Homo diluvii testis) was called into question by contemporaries and 100 years later the “father of palaeontology” Georges Cuvier proved that what was assumed to be the skeleton of a person was actually the skeletal remains of a giant salamander. [As a point of interest – a similar find (Andrias bohemicus) was described in 1897 by the world-famous geologist G. Laube in Břešťany near Teplice.]

The fossil of the Valeč rodent found its way into several collections, was later thought to have been lost and was then rediscovered for science by the palaeontologist Hermann von Mayer, who wrote a scientific treatise about it in 1856 and described the animal as an “omnivorous species of rodent”. The original fossil is housed at the Saxon chateau of Waldenburg, although a copy of it may be seen at the National Museum and in Karlovy Vary Museum.

The actual find site has been destroyed by collectors, but you can combine it with a visit to the chateau park in Valeč, which is open to the public.

Fejfar, O. Nálezy fosilních savců IV. Fauna sopečné oblasti Doupovských hor. Živa 4, 2011, str. 188–192.

Stella, M., Lelková, I. Andrias scheuchzeri a Andrias bohemicus (nejen) v české vědě a kultuře. In: Dějiny věd a techniky, XLIII/2010, č. 4, s. 225–247.

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