Abstract
Palaeontological geotourism could be one of many forms of propagating geological values of a country. It can meet the expectations of many tourists. For this broad category of people, paleontological tourism can instill curiosity about the extinct world, offering them places where they can feel like explorers, visiting these sites with a hammer and a chisel. Many of them will cherish the memories of adventures made during the search in the future, and some will find a new passion. Similar practices are used in Germany, for example, in Solnhofen or Holzmaden, where fossil exploration is available for a small fee. In most regions of Poland, you can find numerous places with fossils that anyone can search for. The greatest number of such sites can be found in the south of Poland, in the uplands and mountains, but also at the seaside, where the practice of palaeontological geotourism is possible. In the Holy Cross Mountains, the Sudetes, or in the Silesian-Cracow region, there are places where one finds fossils of plants or animals, including trace fossils. The only effort required in addition to the search for fossils is to develop guidelines and prepare guides for amateurs that quest for the lost world.
Highlights
Especially among the younger generation, there is a section of geology that is of particular interest, and which is neglected by geology popularisers
The proposal to extend the promotion of geotourism onto the problem of fossils occurring in rocks could widely reach the expectations of many tourists and receive a broad response
Fossils of marine organisms will help to answer the question of what the sea was like: shallow or deep, warm or cool: of normal salinity, brackish or highly saline? If we find many fossils of corals, we are sure that these animals lived in a warm and normally saline sea
Summary
Especially among the younger generation, there is a section of geology that is of particular interest, and which is neglected by geology popularisers. The quarry exposes Upper Permian light grey thick-bedded limestones overlain by brownish sandy clay shales In these rocks, it is possible to encounter fossil brachiopods of Productus, and bivalves, including the genera Schizodus and Pseudomonotis. These can be found in many places of the Holy Cross region (e.g. in Doły Opacie, Sołtyków, Gliniany Las, Bałtów) in Triassic and Jurassic rocks, as well as in Tłumaczów, Lower Silesia, in Permian deposits It is well known, that dinosaurs were terrestrial animals, but their tracks are sometimes found in limestones, which are marine sediments. The most famous, is the „Zachełmie” quarry near Zagnańsk north of Kielce, where tracks of the world’s earliest tetrapods were discovered in Middle Devonian rocks (Niedźwiedzki et al, 2010) Another type of trace fossils are burrows produced in the sediment by various animals and the remains of borings in the rocky substrate by some bivalves, sponges or echinoids. They point to a very shallow, nearshore marine environment during their life activity
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