The Venta Regional Park Visitor Centre is located in the small town of Venta in northern Lithuania. It is also the only place in the Baltic states where rocks from the Jurassic Period, which began 199 million years ago, have been naturally transported to the surface. "Here the glacier has done its job – it has dug up the valley of the Venta River and in the areas from Papilė towards Kuršėnai, where the Jurassic rocks naturally open up, we are trying to look for traces of life," Ramūnas Dulinskis, an adviser at the Venta Regional Park, told LRT.
lt. He runs educational sessions for park visitors, allowing people to dig up fossils and search for the remains of dinosaurs. The territory of present-day Lithuania was almost entirely, except the eastern part of the country, covered by the ocean during the Jurassic period.
As a result, fossils of molluscs, corals, and other marine life are found near the surface. "The Jurassic period began about 205 million years ago and lasted for about 60 million years. To enter the Jurassic climate, you would need to go into a well-watered greenhouse on a hot summer day, where the relative humidity and temperature are high," said Dulinski.
The mass extinction of animals in the preceding Triassic period led to abundant oxygen reserves, which stimulated the development of aquatic and terrestrial wildlife. "If you go to the Saltiski quarry, which contains Triassic clay, you will find practically no organic matter. You might find the remains of a phytosaur, but you can walk around for ten days and find nothing, and when you come here you will still find something," said Dulinski.
He has found several fossils of cephalopods, such as ammonites and belemnites, and is now looking for unique animal remains, such as sea urchins, starfish fossils, and fossilised shells of a distinctive pearlescent hue. One of the most extraordinary finds is a crocodile tooth – Dulinskis dug up one, while the other was found by a fourth-grader in the past summer. The search for fossils in northern Lithuania began two centuries ago when scientists realised its importance.
"At that time, fossils were lying around everywhere because nobody was interested in them. Even now, when I talk to older people, thirty or forty years ago nobody valued them, they were everywhere, you could collect as many as you wanted," said Dulinskis. Most of the valuable fossils have already been studied by scientists, therefore, the digging is mostly left to the enthusiasts.
The fossils can be found in various types of rocks. If they are lodged in sand, they can crumble upon extraction. Sometimes, however, it can take three or four hours of drilling to extract a single shell from a hard stone – only to see it break in front of your eyes.
"You don't have an X-ray machine, so you never know what you're going to find. That's the beauty of it. You can go out for ten minutes and find something, or you can spend a whole day digging around, find nothing and then not go back for a month," says Dulinskis.
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