This journey begins in the dark a long time ago and stretches far into the future. Stone for Stone, it tells the story of life in what is today Thuringia in central Germany millions of years ago. Thomas Martins is showing his successor（继承者）, Tom Hubna, the Braumacher quarry（采石场）, a fossil site close to the town Tambach-Dietatz. Hubna is taking over as the paleontologist（古生物学者） at Friedenstein Castle in Gotap, home to 290 million-year-old treasures from the Lower Permian（[地]二叠纪(的)） period. Martins spent 40 years digging through the Earth's history on this site, and Hubna hopes his time will be similarly fruitful. The Braumacher in the Thuringia forest is a very special fossil locality（所在）.

  You could say the Braumacher is the only lower-permian locality in the world where tracks, prints and the trackmakers that his skeletons can basically be found in one layer. There used to be a common academic consensus（一致） that no one would ever find body fossils in this kind of reddish（微红的）-brown, fine-grained rocks. I guess some academic opinion shouldn't be written in stone. Thomas Martins showed the consensus to be mistaken with the help of a bone he found as a young geologist（地质学家） at the Braumacher Quarry（采石场） in 1974. We weren't actually looking for bones. It happened by coincidence.

  At first, I didn't recognize it as a bone. I thought it was a part of the stone. But then I prepared this white thing and saw it as a bone. My then-teacher, Professor Ano Hermanmüller in Freibag, wrote to me, "Mr.Martins, you didn't find that here. It can't be. There's no such thing here." He subsequently accepted it, gave me a symbolic（ 符号的） pat on my shoulder and from then onward（向前） I came back here every year.

  At the end of the 19th century, a footprint（脚印） left by primitive tetrapod, animals which predate（在日期上早于（先于）） dinosaurs, was discovered by chance on a sandstone block that had come from the Braumacher Quarry. This launched various excavations（挖掘）. The discoveries were brought to the Dukal Museum in Gota or sold to museums and universities around the world. About 150 years before the Braumacher footprint was unearthed（掘出）, finds from another part of Thuringia called Bad Liebenstein had kicked off paleontological research around the world. Stefan Brauner is heading to that beginning. The geologist of the National Geopark Inzelsberg Dreygleiten is working（使工作） his way through the corridors of an old cobalt（[化]钴） and copper（铜） mine.

  Parts of the mine have been made accessible（易接近的） again for scientific research. "This is an older excavation, no? All of this is old. And when is this from? Around 1730." In the 1730s, discoveries were made that would change what we knew and thought about the world forever. "This is where one of the first specimens（范例） of Proterosaurus, or first lizard（蜥蜴）, was found. That discovery, made here in 1733, was particularly valuable.

  The genus was named after that piece. It's now in the Natural History Museum of Vienna." Proterosaurus was the first fossilized primitive reptile（爬行动物） that was ever described. At that time, people knew nothing about fossils. It was not yet generally understood or accepted that these were the remains（遗迹） of former living creatures. Back then, people still thought that these shapes had grown inside the rocks by chance.

  So here we see a recently opened rock, which shows us the history of this region, of the great Thuringian flood that happened here 257 million years ago. On top of the Rotligend lies the Tseisstein, which was laid down by the Tseisstein Sea the year it flooded the central European basin. The rock here below with the large particles is the Tseisstein conglomerate（[岩] 砾岩）. After that, we have a time period which lasted around 50,000 years, when this black copper slate（板岩） formed. During this time, the sea stagnated（停滞） and there was a sludge（软泥） at the bottom, from a poorly（不舒服的 ad贫穷地） ventilated（ 使通风） sea. This is the layer in which the remains of Proterosaurus and many other fossils can be found.

  One geological（地质的） period and many dramatic climate changes later, primitive tetrapod left tracks and wet sand, which eventually became mottled（杂色的） sandstone. The fossilized tracks were discovered in 1833 in the nearby Vincer quarry. They were the very first trace（痕迹） fossils to be described in the history of science. Part of the trace fossil is on display in the Museum of Natural History in the Castle Bertholdsburg-Schloisingen. It's arguably（可论证地） the most beautiful plate, showing three crossing tracks. In the 19th century, people didn't really understand how these creatures walked.

  If you put your hand on the print, you can see your thumb fits really well here. But taking the position of the tracks into account, it became clear（清晰的） that the supposed tau was actually a little finger. So the researchers surmised（猜测） the creatures must have walked crisscross（交叉）, which didn't really seem natural. That's why people were always very uncertain what kind of animals produced these curious tracks. From 1833 to 1851, about twenty different scientific papers were written about them. That's how hot the topic was.

  The hand-shaped prints led to the animals being called hand-beast（兽）. This remains their name to this day. We can determine the shoulder point and the pelvic point of the animals from their tracks and how they step, which means we can estimate and reconstruct（重建） the animal's proportions. In addition, the foot morphology（ 形态学） can be used to determine the animal group, in this case, the pseudo-zuchian archosaurs. Similar animals have been found in Ticino in Switzerland and South America. Both methods lead you toward a phantom picture, which we used as the basis for our reconstructed model.

  The hand-beast is an ancestor of crocodiles and belongs to the crown（王冠） group of dinosaurs. It had a fluid gate like today's mammals（哺乳动物） and dinosaurs before them. This is one of the many details contained in the tour through 300 million years of the Earth's history. Ralph Vanneborg is a sought-after expert for early amphibians（[脊椎] 两栖动物） and set up the museum exhibition. Like Thomas Martens and Stefan Brauna, he stands（站立） in the great tradition of Thuringian fossil researchers and discoverers（发现者）. Hugo Röhle von Lillienstern, for example, discovered the skeleton of a neotherapod, a carnivore（食肉动物） from the Triassic（[地]三叠纪的） period.