Eppelsheim

Eppelsheim is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.GeographyLocationThe municipality lies in Rhenish Hesse.PoliticsMunicipal councilThe council is made up of 16 council members, who were elected at the municipal election held on 7 June 2009, and the honorary mayor as chairwoman.The municipal election held on 7 June 2009 yielded the following results:Coat of armsThe municipality’s arms might be described thus: Per pale sable a lion rampant Or armed and langued gules, and Or an apple twig fructed of two vert.Culture and sightseeingMuseumsDeinotherium at the town hallThe Dinotherium-Museum in Eppelsheim shows original finds of fossil mammals from deposits some 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. One attraction at the Dinotherium-Museum is the cast of a Deinotherium skull that was unearthed in 1835 near Eppelsheim. Also near Eppelsheim came the historically first discovery in 1820 of a fossil femur of a great ape Paidopithex rhenanus (now considered to be an ape relative not an ape - possibly being a Pliopithecoid). The Dinotherium-Museum was former mayor Heiner Roos’s brainchild.