Bijzondere vindplaatsen: Zoogdierfossielen uit Neede

Neede is one of the Dutch localities yielding mammal fossils, which is internationally rather well known. Not in the first place because of its fossils but because it is the type locality of the Needian, a now obsolete name for the Holsteinian Interglacial. The term Needian is still used by some Hungarian authors. The locality Neede consists of a number of abandoned clay pits and sand quarries located in the Needsche Berg, north-northwest of the village of Neede. When the pits were being worked a large number of vertebrate fossils was collected. They are mainly whale vertebrae and shark-teeth from marine Miocene deposits. But there are also mammalian fossils (Trogontherium cuvieri, Dicerorhinus mercki, Cervus elaphus) which derived from Pleistocene deposits, mainly from the socalled Neede Clay. Field trips were organized in 1985 and 1986 especially to collect smaller mammals. They resulted in the recovery of the Neede Clay in the most southerly pit, called ”Weeskes Gaete”. The very large sample taken yielded only a small number of badly preserved, decalcified molars of Apodemus sp., Clethrionomys cf. glareolus, Arvicola terrestris cantiana and Microtini. The larger and smaller mammal fossils give an impression of the Holsteinian mammal fauna, the period in which the Neede Clay was deposited. Based on this knowledge we can conclude that the faunas from Wageningen-Fransche Kamp and Maastricht-Belvédère 3-4 must be younger than the fauna from the Neede Clay and should therefore be correlated with a warm phase of the Early Saalian.