When you did your first timeline of your family's history, and had to offer proof for the events, you probably had no problem with those events in your life or your parent's lives. Finding proof for what happened to your grandparents or great-grandparents was more difficult. Maybe there was a photograph or article of clothing from the event. The deeper you go back in time, the more difficult it is to know and definitely prove what happened. Paleontologists have the same problem. Rather than going back about 100 years, they must go back hundreds of millions of years. Their proof might be a piece of shell, or a track in the mud. Every once in a while they find a true representation of what happened. It would be like you having a time machine to travel back to the event in your great-grandparent's time. This fossil bonanza is called a  Lagerstätte. A 'fossil lagerstätte' (plural lagerstätten) is a deposit which produces fossils of a particular note (it means something equivalent to 'mother lode' in German). Properly, there are two broad categories of lagerstätten - Konservat Lagerstätten and Konzentrat Lagerstätten. The former are noteworthy for high quality preservation (normally of soft parts), and the latter simply for the unusually high concentration of fossils.

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