On a pleasant spring day, I took the train from Frankfurt to Darmstadt and on to Messel to see the well-known (at least among paleontologists and WH collectors) Messel Pit. There is a very nice visitor centre where somne of the finds are exhibited and the tour I joined was quite informative (led by a paleontology student), but also very crowded, and we could also cautiously touch some actual finds, but of course, as the treasures that make Messel famous are either in a museum or still underground, you can't really see much except some features in the landscape - the remains of the volcanic lake that buried the animals eons ago and which now are the reason for Messel's prominence. The next day, I went to the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt to complement my visit, as many fossils from the pit are actually exhibited there. All in all, it was a nice window into a world about which I had previously known very little.