Monte Bolca in the context of "Ypresian"

Bolca is a village in the Veneto, on the southern margin of the Italian Alps. It is a frazione of the comune of Vestenanova, in the province of Verona. The area is famous for the marine fossils from the lagerstätte of Monte Bolca. It was one of the first fossil sites with high quality preservation known to Europeans, and is still an important source of fossils from the Eocene.

A Fossil-Lagerstätte (German pronunciation: [ˈlaːɡɐˌʃtɛtə] – from Lager 'storage, lair' and Stätte 'place'; pl. Lagerstätten) is a sedimentary deposit that preserves an exceptionally high amount of palaeontological information. Konzentrat-Lagerstätten preserve a high concentration of fossils, while Konservat-Lagerstätten offer exceptional fossil preservation, sometimes including preserved soft tissues. Konservat-Lagerstätten may have resulted from carcass burial in an anoxic environment with minimal bacteria, thus delaying the decomposition of both gross and fine biological features until long after a durable impression was created in the surrounding matrix. Fossil-Lagerstätten span geological time from the Neoproterozoic era to the present.

Worldwide, some of the best examples of near-perfect fossilization are the Cambrian Maotianshan shales and Burgess Shale, the Ordovician Fezouata Biota, Beecher's Trilobite Bed, and Soom Shale, the Silurian Waukesha Biota, the Devonian Hunsrück Slates and Gogo Formation, the Carboniferous Mazon Creek, the Triassic Madygen Formation, the Jurassic Posidonia Shale and Solnhofen Limestone, the Cretaceous Yixian, Santana, and Agua Nueva formations and the Tanis Fossil Site, the Eocene Fur Formation, Green River Formation, Messel Formation and Monte Bolca, the Miocene Foulden Maar and Ashfall Fossil Beds, the Pliocene Gray Fossil Site, and the Pleistocene Naracoorte Caves and La Brea Tar Pits.