The Castle Cave

Castles can be scary and/or awe-inspiring. Caves can be scary and/or awe-inspiring. So, what do you suppose you get when you combine the two? You get the Predjama Castle of Slovenia.

Predjama Castle is a renaissance-style castle built with a cave mouth in South-central Slovenia, an area historically known as Inner Carniola.

About 1274, the Patriarch of Aquileia built the first castle at this location, using the Gothic style. At that time, it was known by the German name of Luegg Castle. It was made difficult to access by building it under a natural rocky arch set high in the stone wall below the cave. It was later acquired and expanded by the Luegg noble family, also known as the Knights of Adelsberg.

Sir Erasmus of Lueg became lord of the castle in the 15th century. He was the son of the imperial governor, and according to legend, he killed the commander of the imperial army, who had offended the memory of a deceased friend of Erasmus. Lueg fled the wrath of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, returning to the family fortress at Predjama, where he began to attack estates and villages in the area. Thus he became a robber baron.

The emperor ordered Erasmus be captured or killed, but for a long time, the best that could be accomplished was to lay siege to the castle. Surprisingly, that didn’t seem to keep Sir Erasmus from continuing his attacks. It turned out that there was a vertical shaft through the cave roof. Erasmus ordered it enlarged, and that was not a means to allow him to continue robbing his neighbors, but also allowed him to smuggle food into his besieged castle. Eventually, however, he was killed.

Apparently, the seige saw the destruction of the original castle. The Oberburg family acquired the ruins. A second castle was built by the Purgstall family early in the 16th century, only to be destroyed in an earthquake in 1511.

Better luck next time? It would seem so. In 1570, the current castle was built in the Renaissance style and hugging the vertical cliff. In pictures, you can see the top of the cave mouth hanging just above the tower tops, looking like some huge monster trying vainly to open up enough to swallow it whole.

In the 18th century, it was known as a favorite summer residence of the Cobenzl family. I have to wonder about people who enjoy spending their time in a huge castle precariously protruding from the mouth of a cave. Perhaps they were not gifted/cursed with my level of imagination.

At the end of World War II, the castle was confiscated, nationalized, and turned into a museum.

Have you seen it? Predjama Castle was the castle featured in the 1986 movie Armour of God, starring Jackie Chan. It was also the filming location of Laibach’s Sympathy for the Devil cover’s music video. AND the “Castle” map from the 2014 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive DLC, Operation Breakout, is based on Predjama Castle. So, you might have.

There are lots of pieces of the story of Predjama Castle that would lend themselves to a story. I’ll just add them to the ‘pot’ I have brewing in the back of my mind and see where they gravitate to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predjama_Castle

Canada’s Burgess Shale

We’ve researched fossil beds that included depictions of ‘soft parts’ before. One of the most famous places for finding this type of fossil is the Burgess Shale found in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. It is a large deposit of shale, with at least 2 known outcrops, one near the town of Field in Yoho National Park, and another 42 km south, in the Kootenay National Park. This shale bed is 508 million years old, so it contains some of the earliest known soft-part fossils.

Charles Walcott discovered one of the Burgess Shale beds late in August 1909, just as the season for such work in Canada was drawing to a close for the year. He returned in 1910 with his wife and children to the area of Fossil Ridge. In fact, he returned almost every year until 1924, when he was 74 years old. In that quarter century, he had collected over 65,000 specimens.

He recognized that a huge number of these organisms were unknown to science, and he continued to describe them and attempted to categorise all of them into living taxa until his death in 1927. Unfortunately, most scientists of the time saw the fossils as mere curiosities.

In 1962, Alberto Simonetta started a first-hand reinvestigation of these shale fossils and realized that Walcott had barely scratched the surface, so to speak, because it was clear the fossils did not fit into modern groups.

The Geological Survey of Canada resumed excavations at the Walcott site, as well as established another side 10 metres high on Fossil Ridge. Trilobite expert Harry Blackmore Whittington and his helpers began a thorough reassessment of the Burgess Shale, discovering that the fauna were much more diverse and unusual than Walcott had recognized. Some had bizarre anatomy, including the Opabinia, which had 5 eyes and a snout like a vacuum cleaner hose, and the Hallucigenia, which was originally reconstructed upside down.

Collecting Burgess Shale fossils became more difficult - politically - after the mid-1970’s, when Parks Canada and UNESCO recognized the shale’s significance. Other outcrops have been discovered, and yield new organisms continuously.

One thing I reported previously was that soft tissues are fossilized in anoxic conditions, meaning very little oxygen was present. However, mounting research has shown that oxygen was continually present Burgess Shale was deposited. An alternative hypothesis involves brine, rather than a lack of oxygen.

Of the organism discovered in Burgess Shale, about 14% have hard parts that are more typically fossilized. It is assumed that the organisms without hard parts are typical for the time and location. Free-swimming creatures are relatively rare, while the majority were bottom dwellers, either moving about in some way or attached to the sea floor. About 2/3 of them fed on organic content of the muddy sea floor, while the rest filtered fine particles from the water. Less than 10% were predators or scavengers, but these were larger than the organisms they ate.

If I ever write a story about people who find themselves on a planet during its Cambrian-type age, I’ll have to remember to give my imagination free reign when dreaming up local inhabitants! 5 eyes! A vacuum cleaner nose! Spines on the back that could easily be mistaken for legs. Reality can be so much stranger than fiction!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgess_Shale

What the heck is Lagerstatte?

When I first read about fossils found in ‘Lagerstatte’, I thought it was the name of a place or region, probably in Germany, that had a plethora of fossils residing there. Everything I assumed was pretty correct, except it’s not a place or region, it is a type of place. It turns out that in German, ‘lager’ means ‘storage’ and ‘statte’ means ‘place’. What this word indicates these days is a particular type of sedimentary deposit with fossils of exceptional preservation. I mean, sometimes even the soft tissue has been preserved, which is pretty darned exceptional.

This may have happened when a carcass was buried in an anoxic (without oxygen) environment with minimal bacteria, which would have delayed the decomposition of all biological features until a durable impression was created in the surrounding mud or whatever.

There are 2 types of Lagerstatte beds. The concentration type holds a lot of disarticulated hard parts, such as bones. Invariably, the accumulation of bones without a lot of other sediment takes time, so this type displays a large time period.

The 2nd type is conservation Lagerstatte, which hold exceptional preservation of fossilized organism or traces. Each of these sites can provide answers to important moment in the evolution and history of life. It’s like a snapshot, allowing the viewer to see the entire animal, even what the skin was like. Or the texture of a feather or shape of a footprint, in the case of a trace.

My first thought after reading about lagerstatte was that the now-fossilized creature must have fallen into water or mud, but there is oxygen in water (and thus in mud also), so that would not necessarily provide an anoxic condition. Still, there were places for them to land in order to be truly well-preserved.

Several types of inorganic replacement of the organic remains were mentioned in my reading; phosphorus, silica, pyrite (iron) and microbial mats. But in all these cases, this chemical change happened underwater. And if I read things rightly, under seawater.

The articles did have some pictures of these fossils, but they weren’t of T Rexes or stegosaurs, so I didn’t know what to look for. I gather that the large majority of these fossils are from way back when most creatures didn’t have bones, so they weren’t very large, and they hadn’t been well known before Lagerstatte beds were found.

I would have preferred to see one of these fossils first hand. Not to touch it, but when you have a picture, you can’t change the angle of how the light hits it and bounces into your eye. Sometimes just changing the angle a little can let you see details you otherwise wouldn’t notice. So I feel like having the item in front of me - even if in a display case - would let me study the tiny nuances that make these discoveries so exciting for those in the field.

Now, how could I use this knowledge in my writing? I don’t know. One of the beauties of writing fiction is that you get to use bits and pieces of knowledge in unimagined ways. So now that I have this knowledge, I can look for ways to use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagerst%C3%A4tte

http://www.fossilmuseum.net/fossilrecord/Lagerstatte.htm