Unusually well-preserved reef corals from the Geological and Paleontological Collection at Leipzig University hold a great secret: They allow us to travel far into the past and reconstruct climatic conditions in our latitudes. Researchers from Leipzig University, the Universities of Bremen and Greifswald, and UniLaSalle in Beauvais have now succeeded in doing just this. Using chemical analyses, they were able to model seasonal temperature fluctuations of this period and show for the first time that corals already lived in symbiosis with algae 40 million years ago. Their results, which may also serve to improve current climate forecasts, have been published in the journal Science Advances.
