The Murnau landscape is characterized by its location on the edge of the steeply rising foothills of the Alps, by the wide basin of the Murnau and Eschenloher Moos and by the hilly moraine and moor landscape with the Staffelsee and the Riegsee. It was formed in a long and changeable geological history that began with the Mesozoic era around 250 million years ago. The rocks that make up the landscape were deposited during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. In the Quaternary period - 2 million years ago - the final formation of the landscape as we know it today began: through the erosion and deposits of the ice age glaciers. Fossils, remains and traces of plants and animals are sometimes preserved in the rock layers. They document the development of life on earth. The z. T.'s restored mammoth tusk was found in 1981 in a gravel pit on the B2 (Murnau - Garmisch-Partenkirchen). Woolly mammoths evolved from steppe elephants around 250,000 years ago. They were perfectly adapted to the ice age climate. With the global warming that began around 19,000 years ago, the Alpine glaciers covering the Alpine foothills began to melt. As a result, the mammoths on the northern edge of the Alps lost the mammoth steppe - their habitat. They followed the ice age climate zone, which was vital for mammoths and shifted to the northeast, until they died out around 4,000 years ago (before today) on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean. The petrified wood comes from the so-called Black Jurassic (199 to 175 million years ago); the place where it was found was Ohlstadt. The leaf of a three-edged oak (Trigonobalanus) dates back to the Tertiary (66 million years ago to 2.6 million years ago) and was found in the Hagen Gorge.