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Introduction:
The chain of the Jurassic highlands stretches through a big part of Central Europe from France and Switzerland to Germany. The Swabian Jura – also called Swabian Alb – is the central part of this chain between the Swiss and the Franconian Jura. Bordered by the Black Forest and the Baar region in the south-west, the upper Neckar valley to the north, the Ries crater to the east and the river Danube to the south, the Swabian Alb extends across South-West Germany over a length of approximately 220 km and a width of up to 80 km. The evidence of the Jurassic time dominates the area, but older and younger periods are also represented. Altogether they provide an outstanding variety of geological, paleontological and ecological features.
Geological andArcheological Heritage:
The Swabian Alb offers not only globally significant geological and paleontologicalfeatures like the type localities for the stages Aalenium and the Pliensbachium, the fossil sites of Holzmaden, Dotternhausen and Nusplingen, two meteorite craters or the "Swabian volcano" with more than 350 chimneys, but it is also archaeologically highly relevant the oldest sculptures of art and one of the oldest music instruments of mankind originating from here.
The karst landscape offers a large variety of different geotopes for example dolines, fossile reef rocks, karst springs (for instance the impressive chalk well "Blautopf" with an output from 290 l/sec. up to 25,750 l/sec.), karst caves (highest density of caves in Germany) and rare geological phenomena like the "Böttinger Marble", a thermic limestone travertine including plant and animal fossils. "Water´s struggle on the Swabian Alb" is a fascinating one: here you find the European wathershed, the line between the water that flows into the North Sea via river Rhine and the water that flows into the Black Sea via river Danube.
Geology plays an outstanding role for landscape and land use in history and today. People of the Stone Age came to search for flint stones and to use the caves as shelters. Rich iron deposits have been built up during the time of Brown Jurassic in the Swabian Jurassic ocean and are also present as bean iron ore in Tertiary fissure fillings. Celtic people used the carstic iron brass (one of the oldest smelting places known in Europe). The various bizarre cliffs of the Swabian Alb have their origin in the sponge and coral reefs of the Jurrasic Sea. They are situated at the rims of the valleys as steep outstanding groups of cliffs. Noblemen of the middle age used the fossil reef rocks for building their castles on top of them. The areas of the rims of these "Schwammstotzen" are highly fossiliferous. Still today the pattern of human settlements in an area ill supplied by water shows the characteristics of the petrography as some rocks like the basaltic fillings of the volcanic chimneys retain water. Villages emerged around so called "Hühlen" were rainwater accumulated on top of these chimneys.
The vivid volcanic activity in the area during Miocene time not only formed prominent remnants in form ofvolcanic plugs prepared later by erosion, but as well crater lakes and other morphological forms deepened into the surface of the Alb. The most outstanding one, the Randecker Maar at the northern rim of the Alb, is explained in a nature protection centre. The approximately 16 million year old sediments of this former Crater Lake (Maar) are a real "treasure trunk" of information concerning the flora and fauna of this epoch. At the Höwenegg, which is another volcano with Crater lake sediments, actual excavations reveal the life in this area during the Upper Miocene, 10 million years ago.
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