About 15 million years ago, the impact of a meteorite created the Steinheim Basin - probably the best-preserved and most striking meteorite crater with a central cone today. This natural event, its consequences as well as life and death in and around the Miocene Lake Steinheim have been vividly portrayed in the Meteor Crater Museum in the Sontheim district of the Stubental valley since 1978.
The impact was soon followed by life again. A crater lake formed, in whose deposits countless remains of life have been magnificently preserved to this day. The large number of fossils found - about 230 animal and 90 plant species - testify to the former attraction of the lake. The fossils give us an insight into the living world of a 14-million-year-old period of the Tertiary period.
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