In all the books the fossil beds are said to be at Oeningen, which is the name of a once celebrated Augustinian monastery about two miles away. Actually, however, the locality is above the village of Wangen, which is situated on the north bank of the river. In some quite recent writings Oeningen (Wangen) is referred to as being in Switzerland; it is in Baden, though the opposite bank of the Rhine is Swiss. The error is natural, since the fossils have chiefly been made known by the great Swiss paleontologist Heer, of Zurich, and the best general account of them is to be found in his book "The Primaeval World of Switzerland," of which an excellent English translation appeared in 1876. It was at the Oeningen quarries, in the eighteenth century, that a wonderful vertebrate fossil, some four feet long, was discovered. A writer of that period, Scheuchzer, announced it as Homo diluvii testis, a man witness of the deluge! Cuvier knew better, and was able to demonstrate its relationship to the giant salamanders of Eastern Asia and North America. It forms, in fact, a distinct genus of Cryptobranchidae, which Tschudi, apparently mindful of the early error, named Andrias; though the proper name of the animal appears to be Proteocordylus scheuchzeri (Holl.). The stone at Wangen was used for building purposes, and at one time there were three or four quarries actively worked. In earlier times the larger fossils naturally attracted most attention, fishes, snakes, turtles, fresh-water clams and a variety of leaves and fruits. Such specimens were saved, and were sold and distributed to many museums. The supply was good, yet at times not sufficient for the market; so the monks at Oeningen, and others, would carve artificial fossils out of the soft rock, coating them with a brown stain prepared from unripe walnut shells. In later years, during the middle part of the nineteenth century, the period of Darwin, the great importance and interest of the fossil beds came to be better appreciated. Dr. Oswald Heer, professor at Zurich, an accomplished botanist and entomologist, did perhaps nine tenths of the work, describing plants, insects, arachnids and part of the Crustacea. The fishes were described by Agassiz, and later by Winkler. The remaining vertebrates were principally made known by E. von Meyer. From 1847 to 1853 Heer published in three parts a great work on fossil insects, largely concerned with those from Oeningen.[1] In this and later writings he made known 464 species from this locality; but in the latest edition of "The Primaeval World of Switzerland" it is stated that there are 844 species, 384 of these being supposedly new, and named, if at all, only in manuscript. [1] "Die Insektenfauna der Tertiargebilde von Oeningen und von Radoboj in Croatien" (Leipzig: Engelmann).