Eppelsheim

Eppelsheim is a village (Ortsgemeinde) in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

 Geography 
Eppelsheim  lies on a high plateau in the Rhenish Hesse wine region.

 Politics 

 Municipal council 
The  village has a council that governs it.  The council has 16 members.  These members are elected by the people of the village.  In the 2014 election, 9 members of the FWG and 7 of the SPD were elected.

The honorary mayor is Ute Klenk-Kaufmann.

 Coat of arms 
The village’s arms has two halves.  They are divided vertically.  On the left is a crowned lion.  It is standing on its hind legs and facing left.  The right half has a green branch with two green apples.

 Culture 

 Museums 

 Deinotherium at the town hall 
The Dinotherium-Museum in Eppelsheim holds fossil remains of mammals from deposits about ten million years old from the prehistoric Rhine near Eppelsheim. These deposits are known as the Deinotherium Sands, because they often contain teeth and bones from the extinct proboscid deinotherium.

 Paleontological discoveries 
Besides the dinotherium fossils, the femur of a  Paidopithex rhenanus was found in the area in the 19th century.  This was a now-extinct catarrhine primate.

In 2017, researchers reported finding teeth of an ape dating to about 9.7 million years ago. The teeth seem to belong to a kind of ape similar to Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), but that animal first appeared in Africa more than 4 million years later.

 References 

Other websites
 Municipality’s official webpage in English
 The discovery of the Deinotherium of Eppelsheim  

Category:Municipalities in Rhineland-Palatinate
Category:Towns in Rhineland-Palatinate