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ul. Chełmowa, Kielce
The Zachełmie Quarry nature reserve protects a disused excavation in the Holy Cross Mountains, in the village of Zachełmie near Zagnańsk. It was established in 2010 on an area of just under 8 hectares. The reason for protection is not vegetation but the exposed rock walls: they record both a unique palaeontological site and clearly legible tectonic structures.
Tracks of tetrapods about 395 million years old were discovered in the quarry, from a time when a very shallow sea covered the area. Tetrapods are an intermediate link between fish and four-legged animals, and the Zachełmie find pushed the date of vertebrates moving onto land back by more than a dozen million years compared with earlier findings. It is one of the most important palaeontological discoveries in Poland.
The walls of the pit show one of the few exposures in the country revealing an unconformity in the arrangement of rock layers — younger horizontal beds resting on older, distinctly tilted ones. The site is visited quickly, and boards help to read the record preserved in the rock.
