LOCATIONS — 241/262 — Mesoles
A village 5 km southwest of Kuttenberg. The first written mention of the village is from 1384, and then another from 1445, when the village was sold to the Sasau Monastery. Otherwise, all we know about the village is that in 1932, there were 192 inhabitants and the village had two inns and two blacksmiths, while in the earlier times, we have mentions of only 45 inhabitants.
TRIVIA
— The name of the village of Mezholezy, originally Mezilesi (amongst the woods), was likely inspired by the deep forests once surrounding the settlement. It is the smallest village in the municipality of Miskovice, formerly belonging to the Sázava monastery, Sedlec and Malešov, and in the 17th century in part to the Jesuit college of Kutná Hora. A Baroque Jesuit estate with residential buildings, stables, a granary and a barn, occupying the entire Southeastern part of the village, can still be found today. Mezholezy suffered greatly during the Thirty Years' War, and by 1654, only four inhabited and four deserted homesteads were left. Among the oldest constructions is a former limestone quarry by the road to Bylany, with the ruins of a lime kiln nearby.
It was in this quarry, where in 2003 a doctor and hobby fossil collector on the search for marine mollusks stumbled across the broken pieces of bones, the 40 cm long femur of a dinosaur and fragments of a pelvis and/or ribs. In 2005, parts of finger joints could be found. It took until 2017 for scientists to identify the full significance of the discovery: The specimen was a basal ornithopod dinosaur from the Early Upper Cretaceous period, around 95 to 94 million years ago, the only not-flying dinosaur of this period found in Central Europe north of the Alpine Tethyan area. The bones likely belonged to a roughly 3.5 metres long almost-matured young adult. In 2017, the dinosaur, formerly only referred to as “the first Czech dinosaur”, was also given its proper name: Burianosaurus augustai, named after palaeoartist Zdeněk Burian and palaeontologist Josef Augusta, two Czech scientists who greatly shaped the perception of dinosaurs in the 20th century.
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