Amelia district - The Fossil Forest

The findings

The Fossil Forest of Dunarobba, near Avigliano, is one of the oldest woods in the world. Two million years ago the sea, which alternatively occupied the land of a new-born Umbria, giving space to large lake formations, definetely withdrew.
In its place an ancient lake now called Tiberino came to being, thanks also to the formation of a big natural dam, where animal and vegetable forms quite different from the modern ones, flourished.
The climate was tropical and the waters warm and rich in food.
Hippopotamus and elephants were at home. So were the giant sequoias, all around the hills and the "taxodi", with their powerful trunks and roots immersed in the marshy and warm water.
The waters, coming down from the hills and the mountains which were emerging, must have carried huge quantities of sediments that along with tectonic movements, must have covered those vegetable giants and preserved them until today.
The interpretation is not so simplifiable, but the fact that these sediments preserved the remains of a fresh water fauna, makes us consider the semplification not that far from reality, although quite turbulent and complex in its rather slow times.
These sediments, mostly argils, prevented the natural modification of the trunks to such an extent that when, at the beginning of the eighties, they emerged thanks to the excavations for a quarry, aroused extraordinary interest and curiosity.
It was an authentic fossil forest of some fifty samples, really unique, because it was made of real wood, unlike those whose trunks have been "petrified", that is have turned in rocks shaped as trunks.
It's a museum on its own not just because the fossil remains are still wooden, but because the trunks left are really "patriarchs" of big dimension and considerable age. Just like the giant sequoias today still living in the United States.
Scholars call the Taxodio of Dunarobba Taxodioxylon gypsaceum, an extinct species of conifer with pyramidal shape, columnar trunk, just similar to the present "Sequoia sempervirens", the one of Yellowstone Park, to understand each other, which can live up to a thousand years.