PURE COLLECTOR’S HAPPINESS

When the German collector Fred Neubauer drove past the village of Evrecy in Calvados in the north of France in June 2010, he noticed a freshly excavated pit next to the road.

Fred climbed down and turned over the first chunks of rock – and there he was looking at one of the most beautiful ammonites ever discovered in northern France. One side still stuck in the rock turned out to be almost flawless with all its bizarre spines and narrow ribs. And as if to make the luck perfect, even the massive mouth rim of the ammonite, i.e. the front edge of the living chamber, is undamaged.185 million years later, however, it took over 150 hours of highly concentrated work and the use of state-of-the-art preparation techniques to free these four ammonites, perfectly preserved with their spines, from the hard rock under the microscope.But then he takes his time. After weeks of unimaginably concentrated work in front of the microscope, he extracts the unique find from the rock. Apart from two spines, everything is there – the ammonite is perfectly preserved right down to the innermost coil.