Monte San Giorgio
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How it came to be
Monte San Giorgio is a wooded, pyramid-shaped mountain beside Lake Lugano, on the border between Switzerland and Italy. In the Middle Triassic, 245 to 230 million years ago, it was a tropical lagoon sheltered by an offshore reef. Besides marine fossils of reptiles, fish, bivalves and ammonites, its nearness to land left fossils of land reptiles, insects and plants.
In 1847 the Italian palaeontologist Giulio Curioni first mentioned fossils on the mountain, and in 1854 Emilio Cornalia published the first paper about them. Mining of bituminous shale resumed in the early 20th century, and a plant at Spinirolo opened in 1908 to turn the shale into an ointment. That work drew Bernhard Peyer of the University of Zurich, whose systematic excavations from 1924 to 1938 uncovered many new species.
In 1943 bombing destroyed the Monte San Giorgio collection of the Civic Museum of Natural History in Milan. Peyer's student Emil Kuhn-Schnyder resumed excavation in 1950. The Swiss part was inscribed in 2003 and the Italian part added in 2010, bringing the property to 1,089.34 hectares. By 2010 more than 21,000 specimens had been collected.
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