schizodelphis
Dance performance for the presentation of a fossil dolphin skull
commissioned by Hans-Georg Krenmayr, GeoSphere Austria
19 November 2026 · GeoSphere Austria, Neulinggasse 38, 1030 Vienna
Background
In the summer of 2020, exposed bone fragments were discovered in a sandstone concretion in the Vöckla riverbank. The concretion was recovered a few months later, and the fossil it contained was revealed in an elaborate preparation process.
What emerged was the nearly complete skull of a long-snouted odontocete that lived in the Molasse Sea around 18 million years ago – presumably a Schizodelphis, a member of the now-extinct family Eurhinodelphinidae. These Miocene odontocetes were characterised by their exceptionally long, slender rostrum.
The fossil comes from the silty-sandy sediments of the Vöckla Formation – deposits of a shallow sea strongly influenced by tides, in which this odontocete lived around 18 million years ago.
Background
In the summer of 2020, exposed bone fragments were discovered in a sandstone concretion in the Vöckla riverbank. The concretion was recovered a few months later, and the fossil it contained was revealed in an elaborate preparation process.
What emerged was the nearly complete skull of a long-snouted odontocete that lived in the Molasse Sea around 18 million years ago – presumably a Schizodelphis, a member of the now-extinct family Eurhinodelphinidae. These Miocene odontocetes were characterised by their exceptionally long, slender rostrum.
The fossil comes from the silty-sandy sediments of the Vöckla Formation – deposits of a shallow sea strongly influenced by tides, in which this odontocete lived around 18 million years ago.
picture above: Speculative AI-generated reconstruction of a long-snouted odontocete (Schizodelphis)
in the Early Miocene Molasse Sea, based on geological and palaeontological research.
The Process
My research usually begins with geological literature. For this project, Hans-Georg Krenmayr and Felix Hofmayer provided me with publications and information about the fossil and the geology of the Vöckla region; further literature, links and conversations with Reinhard Roetzel and Mathias Harzhauser opened additional paths into the Miocene world of the Molasse Sea.
At first, the questions seemed to concern the dolphin itself: What might a Schizodelphis have looked like? How did it move, hunt and perceive its environment? In parallel with reading, I began using AI to create speculative visual reconstructions of this extinct long-snouted odontocete.
But understanding the animal meant understanding the sea it lived in. The research expanded into the Ottnangian Molasse Sea: its strong tides and changing currents, sandy tidal channels and quieter muddy areas, sediment transport, transgression and regression, and the temporary marine connections that made this shallow sea possible.
Trying to understand how this sea came to exist eventually led much further back in time. To understand the Molasse Basin, I had to understand the formation of the Alps; and from there the research reached back through older mountain-building processes to the Variscan orogeny. Geological diagrams, maps and texts became the starting point for visual translations and increasingly physical images: crust bending under the weight of a growing mountain range, a foreland basin subsiding, a coastline slowly migrating across a landscape.
picture: The illustrations were developed in dialogue with AI as scientifically informed artistic approximations of past landscapes and geological processes. They are not to-scale or scientifically exact reconstructions.
Alongside this research I began developing first poses and movement principles – physical markers for geological processes and states rather than a choreography in the usual sense.
A field trip with Hans-Georg Krenmayr brought these abstract processes back into a specific landscape. At the Vöckla we examined the silty-sandy sediments of the Vöckla Formation, fossils and trace fossils, and waded through the river to the wall where the dolphin fossil had been found. There I used the outcrop itself as a site for embodied research – moving with, against and in contact with the sediment wall.
At a nearby exposure of the Atzbach Formation, tidal structures became visible on another scale: inclined layers recording migrating sand bodies, alternating sediment structures, burrows of sea urchins and traces left by organisms anchoring themselves in the seafloor.
Back in the studio, the research returned to the Ottnangian sea: to tidal currents moving sand back and forth, channels migrating laterally, fine sediment remaining suspended and settling during quieter phases, and sand and mud forming flaser and lenticular bedding.
The geological processes gradually become movement material. Rather than illustrating geology with the body, I am looking for physical states through which these processes can be experienced: being carried, displaced, suspended, deposited, compressed, eroded – becoming sediment, sea, fossil and landscape.
picture: Andrea Nagl performing at the Vöckla wall, trying to feel like a dolphin concretion.
picture above: 3D print of the approximately 18-million-year-old dolphin skull (Schizodelphis sp.) discovered in the Vöckla Formation, © Hans-Georg Krenmayr
References
ongoing research:
Bayerisches Landesamt für Umwelt: Geologische Wanderung durch Bayern – eine Sonderschau des Bayerischen Landesamtes für Umwelt. Teil 1: Von den Alpen in den Bayerischen Wald.
Faupl, Peter (2. Aufl. 2003): Historische Geologie. Eine Einführung.
Faupl, Peter & Reinhard Roetzel (1987): Gezeitenbeeinflußte Ablagerungen der Innviertler Gruppe (Ottnangien) in der oberösterreichischen Molassezone.
Faupl, Peter & Reinhard Roetzel (1990): Die Phosphoritsande und fossilreichen Grobsande: Gezeitenbeeinflußte Ablagerungen der Innviertler Gruppe (Ottnangien) in der oberösterreichischen Molassezone.
Frisch, Wolfgang et al. (2001): The Dachstein Paleosurface and the Augenstein Formation in the Northern Calcareous Alps – a Mosaicstone in the Geomorphological Evolution of the Eastern Alps.
Krenmayr, Hans-Georg (1991): Sedimentologische Untersuchungen der Vöcklaschichten (Innviertler Gruppe, Ottnangien) in der oberösterreichischen Molassezone im Gebiet der Vöckla und der Ager.
Krenmayr, Hans-Georg (1999): The Austrian Sector of the North Alpine Molasse: A Classic Foreland Basin, chapter 2.3.
Krenmayr, Hans-Georg & Reinhard Roetzel (eds.) (1996): Oligozäne und miozäne Becken- und Gezeitensedimente in der Molassezone Oberösterreichs – Exkursionsführer SEDIMENT ’96.
Malzer, Otto et al. (1993): Die Molassezone und deren Untergrund, chapter III.4.
Rupp, Christian (ed.) (2008): Erläuterungen zu Blatt 47 Ried im Innkreis.
Rupp, Christian, Manfred Linner & Gerhard W. Mandl (eds.) (2011): Erläuterungen zur Geologischen Karte von Oberösterreich 1:200.000.
Steininger, Harald & Erich Steiner (eds.): Meeresstrand am Alpenrand. Molassemeer und Wiener Becken.
Steininger, Fritz F. & Godfried Wessely (2000): From the Tethyan Ocean to the Paratethys Sea: Oligocene to Neogene Stratigraphy, Paleogeography and Paleobiogeography of the Circum-Mediterranean Region and the Oligocene to Neogene Basin Evolution in Austria.
Additional research: web research using Wikipedia, Spektrum der Wissenschaft and other online sources; AI-assisted research and discussions with ChatGPT; personal conversations with Hans-Georg Krenmayr, Reinhard Roetzel and Mathias Harzhauser.