Chemnitz Petrified Forest

290-million-year-old tree stumps preserved in place beneath the city centre

The Chemnitz Petrified Forest is genuinely one of the more astonishing things hidden in a German city. The stumps are the remains of a subtropical forest — Cordaites, Sigillaria, and early conifers — that stood here when Saxony sat near the equator. The scale of individual trunks, and the fact that some fell and were preserved lying on their sides, gives a vivid sense of the original forest.

The main in-situ display is in the basement of the Tietz building, but a dedicated museum, the Naturkundemuseum Chemnitz on Moritzstraße, houses further specimens and puts the find in geological context. The combination of the two sites makes for a morning's worth of Permian time travel, a few minutes' walk from the Karl Marx Monument.

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The forest was buried by a volcanic eruption in the Permian period, 290 million years ago, before the age of dinosaurs. The silica-rich ash replaced the organic material cell by cell, preserving the wood in extraordinary detail. The stumps were first discovered during building work in the 19th century and have been excavated at several sites across the city ever since — the largest concentration lies under the Kulturkaufhaus Tietz, and you can see the stumps through a glass floor.

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