Germany - Messel

There are several museums and research institutes running excavations in the Messel Pit, a World Heritage Site in the middle of Germany. Two of them, the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt (HLMD) and the Research Institute Senckenberg, are listed here. The Messel site is known world wide for its fossil-rich oil shale deposits which yield among other things the first horses or insects with color preservation.